The Covid-19 pandemic reshaped society in many ways. This is also noticeable in Internet traffic statistics.

Earlier research has shown that, following lockdown measures, torrent traffic spiked in many countries. However, it was unknown how this surge in usage compared to other traffic patterns.

Canadian broadband management company Sandvine aims to fill this gap.

For over a decade, Sandvine has published data on the relative market share of various services. The most recent report reveals some dramatic changes that can largely be attributed to the coronavirus measures.

Globally, video streaming is dominating. YouTube nearly doubled its market share to 15.94%. At the same time, the traffic share of Netflix and BitTorrent went down to 11.42% and 5.23% respectively.

This is relative, so it doesn’t mean that there is less traffic generated by these latter two categories. Absolute traffic has increased across the board, up almost 40% compared to the start of the year, but YouTube simply grew harder.

When we look at the total traffic share per application in various regions, some interesting patterns emerge. Torrent traffic share is not dropping everywhere. On the contrary, it increased its market share in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

In fact, Sandvine’s data show that BitTorrent traffic has outpaced Netflix in the EMEA. It’s now third in line after YouTube and HTTP, with Netflix coming in fourth place.

Both BitTorrent and Netflix increased their traffic share in the EMEA region, but BitTorrent grew faster. It increased from 5.26% in 2019, to 8.38% now. Again, that’s all relative, so in absolute terms, traffic has more than doubled.

It’s worth noting, however, that Netflix and other streaming services have scaled down their resolution during the pandemic. This means that they would have grown more otherwise.

While torrent traffic is clearly a winner in the EMEA region, the same can’t be said for the Americas and the Asia-Pacific region. In the Americas, torrent traffic is miles behind Netflix, not even listed in the top 10.

In the Asia-Pacific region, torrent traffic lost a lot of its share, plunging from 7.58% in 2019 to 4.47% now. YouTube is the lead there after more than doubling its traffic share to 18.30%.

The overall conclusion from the report is that consumption patterns on the Internet have shifted radically. Video streaming, in particular through YouTube, has a dominating traffic share. BitTorrent traffic, on the other hand, has grown in some regions and dropped in others.

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A copy of the full the Global Internet Phenomena Report COVID-19 Spotlight is available at the Sandvine website

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

All the way back in 1996, the world of videogaming witnessed a massive event. Edge, the most adult, cerebral video game magazine available at the time, reviewed the Nintendo 64 title Super Mario 64 and gave it an unprecedented 10/10.

In today’s world where games publications saturate the Internet, it’s difficult to state the importance of that moment. Edge, without exception, had previously found fault with every other game ever reviewed and when other publications gave out 7/10 scores for average titles, Edge stubbornly refused to give a middling game any more than 50% approval.

That was 24 years ago and despite the massive technological changes witnessed during the last quarter-century, the warmth gamers feel towards Super Mario 64 has only grown. That’s why there were few dry eyes in the house when a fan-made PC port of the legendary title hit the Internet last weekend.

“The fan-made port, which was first shared on social media sites this weekend, was made possible by a 2019 recompilation project which saw fans reverse engineer the game’s source code,” wrote VGC, which first reported the news.

Unlike the emulated versions of SM64 that preceded it, this was a full-blown DirectX 12 port that enabled 4K resolutions, support for ultra-widescreen monitors, plus gameplay facilitated by modern interfaces such as the Xbox One controller. But while modern gamers and historians bathed in the sunshine of this N64 classic, many realized that dark clouds would eventually appear on the horizon.

Perhaps more than any other videogame company in existence today, Nintendo has become associated with a determination to vigorously defend its intellectual property rights and it didn’t take long for this PC-powered title to land on its radar. Despite most discussion forums such as Reddit suppressing links to the game’s executable, it soon began to disappear from file-hosting sites.

The action, at least in part, was taken by US-based law firm Wildwood Law Group LLC, a company known to work with Nintendo in its efforts to suppress the availability of modding tools and products. One of its complaints filed with Google this week and obtained by TorrentFreak reads as follows:

“The copyrighted work is Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 video game, including the audio-visual work, software, and fictional character depictions covered by U.S. Copyright Reg. No. PA[REDACTED],” the notice reads.

“The reported file contains an unauthorized derivative work based on Nintendo’s copyrighted work.”

While the registration number has been redacted in the complaint, the copyright registration number is almost certainly PA0000788138. That was also referenced in a complaint filed by Nintendo against Cloudflare in 2015 when the gaming company was attempting to remove a browser-based version of Super Mario 64 from the Internet.

At the time of writing, at least one of the recent complaints filed by Nintendo’s law firm has curiously failed to take down the content in question. We obviously won’t link to it here but the SM64 PC-port executable is very much alive on the targeted Google Drive URL, as the image below shows.

Other locations haven’t been so lucky, however. Copies uploaded to various file-hosting sites have now been removed and several Reddit posts linking to the game have been deleted too. Fans have been sharing hash values of the files though, which can still yield results with the right search techniques.

Attempting to spoil the fun for those who’d simply like to see the game in action, Nintendo has also been targeting YouTube videos featuring the title running on PC. One example, titled “[ Gameplay ] Super Mario 64 – DX12 PC Port – 4K” was deleted following a copyright complaint, as the image below shows.

In other news, Nintendo suffered a significant data leak this week which included the original Nintendo 64’s source code, among a trove of other data. The twist here is that according to sources familiar with the Super Mario 64 PC port, that data was leaked too and wasn’t yet scheduled for public consumption.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

To help hundreds of millions of people find what they search for, Google has implemented some nifty features over the years.

A search for a movie title, for example, doesn’t only return the most relevant websites. It also comes with ‘snippets’ that show detailed information about the film, including review score and showtimes, when available.

Another Google feature is the movie reel. A search for “Disney Films” returns a carousel of Disney produced titles, and the same is true for other studios and platforms such as Netflix. This trick even works for release years and movie genres.

“Disney Movies”

These features are all powered by Google’s advanced algorithms which tend to be very accurate and effective. The search results are appealing to most users and we assume that the movie studios are happy with them too. The more exposure, the better, after all.

That said, there may be some uses for the movie carousel that Hollywood will be less pleased with. As it turns out, it also works for several piracy-related searches.

For example, when we search for YIFY and YTS movies, we see a featured list of movies that were released by the popular torrent site. While these posters don’t link to any torrents, the torrent site’s domain name is at the top of the search results.

“Movies YTS”

This result makes sense, as YTS is a movie distributor. However, it certainly doesn’t have the rights to share these films in public.

It appears that the movie titles and posters are somehow being scraped from the YTS website as the posters do indeed match up YTS torrent releases. The best illustration is the missing poster for Angel Has Fallen. YTS removed that film from its site as part of a copyright settlement.

The results may differ depending on one’s setup and configuration but we confirmed that the feature works in various settings. Also, it’s not limited to YTS and YIFY either. A search for “Fmovies films” returns a similar reel.

“Fmovies Films”

As mentioned, the posters don’t link to any infringing content. Clicking on them simply brings up more movie details. That said, it’s pretty unusual that pirate releases are highlighted at all.

That also applies to Google’s list of “pirated movies,” which shows up as a ‘related search’ for some terms that are linked to piracy.

“Pirated Movies”

Clicking on those posters actually links to a search for the movie title with the keyword “pirated.” A few years ago that would point to pirate sites, but those have been scrubbed from the top search results now.

Finally, for those who were hoping that this would also work for The Pirate Bay, we have to disappoint. Instead of a reel of Pirate Bay releases, Google just features three films that mention The Pirate Bay.

This isn’t the first time that Google’s algorithms have delivered an unexpected piracy twist. A few years ago, movie ratings from pirate sites showed up in Google’s search snippets, accidentally promoting pirate releases. These soon disappeared after the faux pas was made public.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

Millions of people around the world download torrents on a daily basis. While they are familiar with torrent sites and clients, the significance of trackers is rarely considered.

Technically speaking, trackers coordinate the transfers between people. You tell the tracker what parts of a file you need and which ones you have. It then uses this information to connect you to the right peers.

The most-used public trackers are operated independently from torrent sites. They don’t host any files but simply serve as a constantly updating phone book. By doing so, they have a critical role in the ecosystem.

To find out more about what’s involved in operating a site like that we reached out to Bart, the operator of Opentrackr, which is one of the largest open trackers currently active.

Opentrackr was launched in 2015, mostly out of frustration. As other trackers were disappearing – often due to legal pressure – Bart decided to take matters into his own hands. His goal was to start a content-neutral tracker that would adhere to the law.

“I started the tracker in 2015 when I became frustrated by how many torrents no longer contained any working trackers,” Bart tells us.

“I was thinking, why not make a tracker that does try to follow the law to the best of its ability? A tracker that would not need to disappear due to the pressure of copyright holders?”

Not much later, the tracker was online. Like many other torrent trackers, Opentrackr uses the open-source OpenTracker software. This is known to be very efficient and can handle millions of peers without having to invest in expensive resources.

“Surprisingly, it took less equipment than I was originally expecting! The tracker process uses about 6GB of RAM at the moment and more than half of the time the CPU is idle,” Bart says.

To give that some more context, Opentrackr is hosted on a 10-year-old server. A Dell R410, to be precise, which is running two Intel L5640 CPUs.

The hardware requirements may be modest, but the same can’t be said for the bandwidth usage. On a typical day, the tracker consumes four terabytes of bandwidth. This, despite the fact that the majority of the torrent connections use the efficient UDP protocol.

Over the past years, there haven’t been any dramatic changes in the number of users. It appears to be trending up, however. This is also visible on Opentrackr’s public statistics page.

At the moment, the tracker coordinates the traffic of roughly 10 million torrents, 35 million seeders, and 25 million peers. All this traffic is good for roughly 200,000 connections per second, day in and day out.

Bart has no idea who uses the tracker and what they share. However, to avoid legal problems he decided early on to accept takedown requests for hashes. When these are blocked, users can’t share the linked file through the tracker.

Although the tracker doesn’t host anything itself, the operator sees it as a gesture of goodwill. Also, he wouldn’t have the time or money to fight over this in court.

“I decided that accepting takedown requests for hashes of copyrighted works would be the best, this ensures the tracker isn’t likely going to be taken down for anything copyright related. Because of this, I hope and assume OpenTrackr will survive as long as BitTorrent stays relevant,” Bart says.

“But to be honest, I don’t understand why companies bother with it, in a very oversimplified way I am just a phonebook. But instead of people, there are hashes and instead of phone numbers, there are IP addresses.”

In response to notices, Opentrackr has removed a few thousand hashes, as its transparency report shows. That pales in comparison to the millions of torrents that are tracked.

These takedown notices are usually pretty formal, but there are unusual ones as well. That includes a request from an adult content producer, which sent some interesting screenshots of the editing process as proof of ownership.

“I can tell you they were definitely NSFW haha. It was a change from the legal documents or just plain hash lists I usually receive from copyright holders,” Bart notes.

As for the future, Opentrackr plans to keep on operating as long as there’s a need. Technically, decentralized solutions such as DHT and PEX can do roughly the same job. However, trackers are generally faster and more efficient, especially for less popular torrents.

“Its effect on popular torrents is smaller but the peer and seed counts can still function as a popularity indicator. This is a bit harder to collect using DHT. It’s a relatively simple, robust, and efficient protocol,” Bart concludes.

Opentrackr is mostly a hobby project and Bart pays all costs out of his own pocket. However, he launched a Patreon campaign a few months ago in case people want to support the cause.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.

Following a massive surge in interest over the past several years, Kodi remains the platform of choice for millions of people looking to access movies and TV shows for free.

In its standard form, the Kodi software is entirely legal but when augmented with third-party add-ons, it turns into a piracy powerhouse.

As a result, the developers of Kodi are legally in the clear but the same cannot be said for the developers of the countless add-ons designed for the express purpose of finding, accessing, and delivering infringing content. The MPA and like-minded companies are in a constant battle to disrupt their activities, sometimes ending up in court to achieve those goals.

Some of these actions are heavily publicized but others maintain a lower profile. In February 2018, a developer known online as ‘Blamo’ (aka ‘Mr. Blamo’) revealed that he, in common with several of his counterparts, had been threatened by content companies. From there the trail went cold but according to a complaint filed against Github this week, legal action in Canada followed.

On September 7, 2018, a dozen companies including the studios of the MPA/MPA-Canada plus Amazon and Netflix launched a copyright infringement lawsuit at Canada’s Federal Court against an individual “doing business” as Mr. Blamo.

“In the context of that action, our clients alleged that [Blamo] notably developed, hosted, promoted and distributed infringing add-ons for the Kodi media center, which provided unauthorized access to motion pictures and television content for which the copyright is owned by our clients,” the MPA writes.

According to Federal Court records, Blamo did not mount any kind of defense so as a result, the matter was decided in his absence. On January 15, 2019, the Federal Court handed down a final judgment, including a declaration of infringement and a permanent injunction.

“The permanent injunction enjoins and restrains [Blamo] from, inter alia, hosting, distributing or promoting infringing Kodi add-ons and their repositories, including notably the ‘Blamo’ repository and the ‘Chocolate Salty Balls’ infringing add-ons,” the MPA adds.

The problem here is that, according to the MPA and associated companies, Blamo has a Github account where it is claimed he continues to “host and distribute infringing Kodi add-ons and their repository, including notably the Chocolate Salty Balls infringing add-on and the Blamo repository.” This, the MPA says, amounts to contempt of court.

What’s particularly interesting here, however, is that the MPA isn’t asking for the specified URLs to be deleted. Instead, it asks for Blamo’s entire Github account to be deactivated instead. According to the studios they wrote to Blamo, most recently on December 19, 2019, to request that he “cease his infringing activities” but that correspondence apparently fell on deaf ears.

“We request that GitHub, Inc. (‘GitHub’) suspend the account github.com/MrBlamo6969 (the ‘Account’). The Account is used by its operator to engage in ongoing acts of copyright infringement in contravention of an Order of the Federal Court (Canada) issued on January 15, 2019, which amounts to contempt of Court by the Account’s operator,” the MPA’s complaint reads.

“We therefore request that GitHub immediately suspends the Account to preserve our clients’ rights and ensure that the letter and spirit of the final Judgment of the Federal Court are respected.”

As the image above shows, Github declined to delete the entire account as requested. However, it has deleted the first two URLs listed in the MPA’s complaint, URLs that contained the content specifically covered by the injunction handed down by the Federal Court in Canada.

Whether that will be the end of the matter remains unclear but at least from a functional perspective, Github does appear to have acted in the ‘spirit’ of the court order.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, torrent sites and more. We also help you to find the best anonymous VPN.