Warning: This may contain spoilers.

As a huge Black Mirror fan, I was excited – extremely excited – to learn that Netflix would be presenting the latest installment of the series at the end of December.

Right on cue, Bandersnatch hit the streaming service and within minutes I’d left the office for the comfort of the living room. Firing it up on my four-year-old LG smart TV I was immediately frustrated. According to the video that began to play, my TV is too old and outdated to play the promised interactive feast.

This, I initially thought, was part of the usual mind games Black Mirror likes to play with its viewers. I was wrong. My TV really was incapable of playing Bandersnatch. Undeterred, I grabbed an Amazon Firestick and within 15 minutes had set up Netflix and was watching the show. Minor setup irritations aside, I was in the game – literally, and in more ways than one.

The story behind Bandersnatch is important to me and as a former ZX Spectrum programmer, the nostalgia was fantastic. The title was immediately exciting too.

Bandersnatch – along with Psyclapse – were two ‘megagames’ planned by long-defunct UK developer Imagine in the 1980s, neither of which came to fruition. Only adding to the fun was that the main character in Bandersnatch, young programmer Stefan Butler, shared the same surname as Imagine founder Mark Butler. No coincidence, of course.

From here, however, things went downhill – for me at least.

‘Playing’ Bandersnatch (or effectively choosing ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at various points) felt archaic. Aside from much better ‘graphics’, these choices felt little more advanced than those presented in early interactive video games such as Night Trap and Sewer Shark on the Sega CD / Mega-CD in the early 90s. Or (fans of Bandersnatch, please forgive me) the 1980s laserdisc game Dragon’s Lair, which admittedly only had one ending (Bandersnatch has five).

Nevertheless, desperate not to miss out on better things to come, my partner and I continued ‘playing’ Bandersnatch but sadly (and this is just my opinion) things didn’t improve.

While still fascinated by the details (even down to the ancient dk’Tronics addon Spectrum keyboard hidden away in one of the scenes), this didn’t feel like the groundbreaking adventure we’d been promised.

Ultimately, i’m desperately sad to say, the key emotion that developed in me while watching Bandersnatch was one of frustration, especially the seemingly endless looping back after ‘bad’ decisions. This felt like interactivity for the sake of it but the online hype meant that this movie was always going to be popular and, of course, a target for pirates.

But the big question remains: how it could be replicated outside Netflix?

Initially, several torrents appeared online featuring the default run through of the show, i.e the version of Bandersnatch that viewers would get if they didn’t make any decisions at all in the movie.

According to statistics gathered by TorrentFreak, this version is doing pretty ‘well’ on most torrent sites, even without any form of interactivity. There’s also a ‘full’ version containing in excess of five hours of footage – good luck enduring or making sense of that.

However, pirates always want something more – they want the full Netflix experience, probably without paying for the streaming service, if possible.

Notably though, there is still no ‘pirate’ fully-interactive version of Bandersnatch available publicly. This is interesting on a number of fronts. Firstly, pretty much everything gets pirated these days but apparently, perhaps for technical reasons, this is proving more difficult. In 2019, that is somewhat strange.

We’ve had the technology to do this – albeit much less seamlessly – since DVD chapters were invented. Interactive porn movies have been available for years and, albeit in a more primitive form, CD ROM-based titles dating back decades could’ve achieved something passably similar.

Pirates can decrypt DVDs, Blu-rays, defeat most DRM – including cracking the fiendish Denuvo – yet preparing a system to play through a few video clips in a user-selected order is either too difficult or, more likely, too time-consuming for the pirates at the top of the pyramid.

This has led to many interesting comments on torrent and discussion sites, many centered on how this problem can be solved. But perhaps more interestingly, there are others advising another course of action.

“For this one in particular, YOU NEED to experience it on Netflix,” the top commenter on a RARBG torrent writes.

“It’s not just a movie… You can even get the character to go crazy and start a kung-fu fight with his therapist and father, or even get the actual actor to have a mental breakdown during shooting… Amazing idea. It feels like you’re inside an old-school adventure game.”

Just to reiterate, this is a user of one of the most popular torrent sites, that indexes the majority of mainstream stuff that anyone could ever need (and has all of the Bandersnatch torrents available), advising people that they need to enjoy this on Netflix. A subscription service, no less.

Although one swallow does not a summer make, as Aristotle once said, the commenter is absolutely correct. If the viewer wants to have the full Bandersnatch experience right now, he or she is going to have to dig deep and give Netflix a few dollars for the privilege. For a big movie title, this is pretty much unprecedented.

While I’ve not been particularly complimentary about Bandersnatch as a package, one has to admire Netflix and Charlie Brooker and his team for having the guts to put something like this together. Not only have they produced something that seemingly the whole world is talking about (even if some didn’t enjoy it), they’ve created a movie experience that is currently unavailable for free.

And, let’s not forget, this is just the beginning. The Verge has a great article on other potential uses for a title like Bandersnatch, particularly that the ‘adventure’ choices made by viewers could be further leveraged to generate additional revenue streams.

I enjoyed chopping ‘my’ dad up, but it would be a shame for Netflix to do the same to this format. It’s only just beginning and the next few iterations, when they inevitably arrive, will surely be a lot better. And, indeed, even more difficult to pirate. For now at least.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

A few month ago, BitTorrent and its new owner TRON announced a novel plan to extend the BitTorrent protocol with an “in-client token economy.”

The idea behind Project Atlas, as it’s named, is to add ‘currency’ to the BitTorrent protocol through a series of extensions. This makes it possible to financially reward seeders, or to speed up torrents by paying for faster access.

Earlier this week BitTorrent CEO Justin Sun confirmed the ambition when he announced the new BitTorrent token (BTT) that will be used to pay “to improve network speed.”

While it’s hard to review a product that has yet to be released, the descriptions we’ve seen so far do raise a crucial question. Is the ‘token-economy’ proposed by Project Atlas compatible with Net Neutrality?

We ask this question because BitTorrent has been a fierce proponent of an open Internet. It has been a frontrunner in advocating for Net Neutrality, repeatedly criticizing paid traffic prioritization and so-called “fast lanes”.

BitTorrent went as far as creating the dedicated “Internetbetter” website, avenging FCC’s plans to meddle with the ‘Open Internet,’ advertising its campaign on a massive billboard.

“The FCC’s proposed changes to Net Neutrality would create a preferential fast lane for designated traffic,” BitTorrent wrote at the time.

“Those with the deep pockets to pay for this fast lane will have the ability to access and distribute content at higher speeds. Those who lack the purchasing power will be disadvantaged. This moves us towards an Internet of discrimination.”

Internetbetter

In FCC’s case, the fast lanes often refer to companies that pay for improved access to consumers, while others are relegated to the slow lane. In other words, those who pay get better access.

This brings us back to Project Atlas, which promises to pay seeders for their bandwidth. While that may sound great to many, there’s also an input side to this token economy; people who pay for faster access or other features.

While details are scarce, it’s clear that with the BTT token users will be able to pay to speed up their downloads. It’s not clear how this will work, but it’s likely that a paying downloader will get priority over others.

That sounds a bit like a “fast lane” and paid “prioritization,” albeit on a different scale. Large companies are not paying for faster access in this case, but ‘wealthy’ BitTorrent users are.

TorrentFreak asked both TRON and BitTorrent about their thoughts on this Net Neutrality argument and if it presents a problem. The TRON team said that it couldn’t comment on the matter, while BitTorrent didn’t respond at all.

How much of an issue this Net Neutrality angle will depend on the eventual implementation. There’s a reason for concern if BitTorrent users can indeed get a bigger chunk of the available bandwidth in a swarm, as that means that others will receive files slower.

That said, the payment incentives may also increase the overall speed of the swarm as people will seed more. That could benefit everyone, which is less of a problem, of course.

Perhaps it’s fitting to end with two cautioning quotes from BitTorrent itself, again taken from the Internetbetter site. They referred to the FCC’s then-looming Net Neutrality repeal, but they may help the Project Atlas team as well.

“We are at a crossroads, and the decisions made in the upcoming months will set a precedent for decades to come. We want to be on the right side of history,” BitTorrent cautioned.

“This is the generation that will decide if tomorrow’s Internet will be a platform for freedom and opportunity, or a tool for control and monetization,” the company added

Wise words…

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Hola is a very well-known brand in the VPN and proxy space but the company has been roundly criticized for the manner in which its free core product operates.

While traditional VPN services use encrypted servers to relay customer traffic and tend to focus on privacy, Hola’s free model is based on utilizing the resources and bandwidth of its users. During December, Trend Micro published a scathing report, describing Hola as an “unsafe VPN”.

Hola fired back, stating that its free service isn’t designed for privacy or anonymity but agreeing that users’ bandwidth is utilized by Luminati Networks, the company behind Hola. But while controversial, it’s clear that Luminati is keen to protect its business model.

In a patent infringement lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of Texas which has largely flown under the radar, Luminati Networks Ltd is suing BI Science Inc., the company behind another so-called “residential proxy network” known as GeoSurf.

Both parties are based in Israel but Luminati claims the Court has jurisdiction, in part due to some GeoSurf users having residential IP addresses in Texas.

Luminati claims ownership over a number of patents, as listed on its website, which protect methods for “fetching content over the Internet through the use of intermediary tunneling devices.”

“Luminati permits its business customers to utilize its residential proxy network to access data over the Internet using residential IP addresses from various localities as required by the customers,” the suit reads.

“These residential IP addresses provide businesses with a number of advantages. For example, Luminati’s customers may use this network to anonymously compare prices leading to more transparency and lower prices for consumers. Luminati’s customers may also use residential proxy addresses to test their web sites from any city in the world.”

The lawsuit provides details of Luminati’s investor shareholders, whose representatives were given access to confidential information about the service in May 2015, including “trade secrets and know how.”

It’s claimed that these representatives, who previously founded BI Science in 2009, went on to introduce their own residential proxy service under the GeoSurf brand in July 2017, “having estimated that switching to a residential proxy service from a server-based service could dramatically reduce BI Science’s ongoing server costs and provide BI Science with new revenue streams from this capability.”

It’s further alleged that three former Luminati employees, who were under confidentiality and non-compete agreements with the company, went on to join BI Science “within months” of leaving Luminati.

“Upon information and belief, BI Science hired these former Luminati salespeople for the purposes of selling BI Science’s competing ‘Geosurf’ residential proxy service,” the suit notes, adding that Luminati lost customers as a result.

“Luminati has suffered damage because of the infringing activities of BI Science, its officers, agents, servants, employees, associates, partners, and other persons who are in active concert or participation therewith, and Luminati will continue to suffer irreparable harm for which there is no adequate remedy at law unless BI Science’s infringing activities are preliminarily and permanently enjoined by this Court,” Luminati adds.

The two patents allegedly being infringed upon by GeoSurf are also the subject of dispute in another suit filed in July against UAB Tesonet, the company behind residential proxy service Oxylabs.

While fairly complex from a technical perspective, the Luminati v BI Science lawsuit here (pdf) provides a broad yet useful overview of how so-called “residential” or “community” type proxy services operate.

The take-home for the privacy-aware is that these peer-to-peer proxy-based products should never be confused with what most people consider to be a strong, encrypted, privacy-focused VPN service.

There is a very good reason why Hola-style “community” services are mostly free to the home user, so consumers are strongly advised to study the small print before signing up to any service, to be absolutely sure of what they’re getting into.

If becoming part of a network that utilizes and monetizes your Internet connection behind the scenes sounds attractive, then “community” services are perfect for you. If not, a few dollars, euros, or pounds per month spent with a reputable company is a far superior option.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

While uploading infringing content is generally considered illegal in many countries around the world, downloading and streaming can be different matters.

Specifically outlawed in the EU, laws on streaming are less obvious in other regions due to a lack of clarification and relevant test cases. In some countries, downloading is often considered to sit in a legal gray area due to private copying exceptions and blank media levies. In Japan, there’s a significant loophole for some content.

While downloading music and movies is illegal, Japan’s Copyright Act doesn’t offer the same protection for still images, meaning that photographs and the country’s treasured manga material can be obtained at will.

However, according to Mainichi sources familiar with government planning, changes are already in the pipeline. The Agency for Cultural Affairs is reportedly mulling the criminalization of copyrighted image downloading, when the downloader knows that the content they’re obtaining is pirated.

In common with a law introduced in 2012, penalties for downloading manga and other static images could be as steep as two years in prison with fines of up to two million yen (US$17,729) plus the potential for damages awards.

Interestingly, it’s claimed that the new rules will apply to people who download images to their devices but not to those who simply view images on piracy sites. The complication here is that for images to be viewed on a device, they have to be downloaded, so even people who view sites are technically downloading pirated images.

There are similar arguments made for and against the legality of streaming video in some regions, with some believing that streaming is different to downloading since a copy isn’t retained. However, content still has to be presented to a device in order for it to be viewed, so it could be argued that a copy is being downloaded.

According to the unnamed sources, the new restrictions are being incorporated into draft revisions of the Copyright Act by a panel of the copyright subcommittee of the Council for Cultural Affairs. Indications suggest that the draft will be made available for public comments.

Laws that attempt to criminalize downloading are often seen as somewhat ineffective. While there is always the message of deterrence, proving that someone has downloaded copyright-infringing manga, for example, is a difficult task.

While illegal uploads (using BitTorrent, for example) are very easy to track, downloads from the kinds of hosting or linking sites that tend to offer manga are not, so it’s far from clear how anyone could be prosecuted, without gaining access to private machines and pirated content collections.

That being said, Japan intends to criminalize platforms too. In October 2018 it was revealed that operators of sites that link to copyright-infringing content could face prison terms of up to five years if they knowingly link to pirated content and refuse to respond to takedowns requests.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Since the turn of the last decade, numerous people have been accused in US courts of illegal file-sharing.

Initially, these lawsuits targeted hundreds or thousands of BitTorrent users per case, but this practice has since been rooted out. Now, most file-sharing cases target a single person, up to a dozen or two at most.

This means that the number of “Doe” defendants have gone down, but the same can’t be said for the number of cases that are on the dockets. In fact, the number of file-sharing cases filed last year was higher than ever.

Data collected by TorrentFreak from court records all over the country show that in the first half of the year, more than 3,300 separate lawsuits were filed. The majority of these cases list a single ‘John Doe’ defendant.

This is more than triple the number of lawsuits in the year before, when 1,019 file-sharing cases were filed according to Lex Machina. And it’s also more than the old 2,887 record that was set in 2015.

Pretty much all of this activity can be attributed to two adult industry companies – Malibu Media and Strike 3 Holdings.

Malibu Media, the Los Angeles based company behind the ‘X-Art’ adult movies, has been one of the most active copyright trolls for years. According to data from court records, it filed 1,231 cases in 2017.

The most active filer last year, Strike 3 Holdings, is a relative newcomer. The company, which distributes its adult videos via the Blacked, Tushy, and Vixen websites, has filed 2,092 cases over the past twelve months.

Some of Strike 3’s recent cases

Strike 3’s cases are similar to those filed by Malibu Media. This is no surprise since they are handled by former Malibu lawyer Emilie Kennedy, who now works as in-house counsel at Strike 3.

Together, both companies are good for more than 3,300 new cases last year. In terms of numbers, there’s a gaping hole behind these two, with Bodyguard Productions coming in third place with 70 cases.

To the best of our knowledge, those three are the only filers of lawsuits that targeted alleged BitTorrent pirates last year.

With thousands of new cases, these companies are good for more than half of all copyright lawsuits in the US. According to Justia, there were a little over 6,000 cases in total.

This wave of file-sharing legal action is something that hasn’t gone unnoticed to courts around the country, some of which have become more skeptical.

A high-profile order at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals a few months ago proves to be a particularly significant roadblock. Referencing the decision, federal courts in districts across the US are now demanding “something more” than an IP-address alone.

For now, however, new lawsuits continue to be filed, also in 2019. In the months to come the wider impact of the appeal court ruling will be felt and whether this will affect the number of new cases this year.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.