First launched just a decade ago, search engine DuckDuckGo is a goto tool for Internet users who value their privacy.

Unlike many competitors, the site doesn’t keep a record of users’ IP addresses or other sensitive information.

The search engine also has a variety of useful features such as instant answers and bangs. The latter are particularly useful for people who want to use DuckDuckGo to search directly on other sites.

Typing ‘!yt keyword’ will do a direct search on YouTube, for example, ‘!w keyword’ goes to Wikipedia, and ‘!torrentfreak keyword’ does a search on TorrentFreak. This library of bangs has been around for a long time and has grown to more than 10,000 over the years.

However, a few days ago, roughly 2,000 of these were removed. Interestingly, this included many bangs that link to torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay, 1337x and RARBG. Similarly, bangs for OpenSubtitles, Sci-Hub and LibGen are gone too.

Pirate Bay bang stopped working

Initially, it was unclear what had happened, but after people started asking questions on Reddit, DuckDuckGo staff explained that this was part of a larger cleanup operation.

DuckDuckGo went through its bangs library and removed all non-working versions, as well as verbose ones that were not actively used. In addition, many pirate site bangs were deleted as these are no longer “permitted.”

“Bangs had been neglected for some time, and there were tons of broken ones. As part of the bang clean-up, we also removed some that were pointing to primarily illegal content,” DuckDuckGo staffer Tagawa explains.

The search engine still indexes the sites in question but it feels that offering curated search shortcuts for these sites in their service might cause problems.

Apparently, this wasn’t a major issue when the bangs were first introduced. However, perhaps in part due to a changing perspective on the role of third-party intermediaries, DuckDuckGo sees potential liability issues now.

“It may not seem like so at first blush, but it is very different legally if it is a bang vs. in the search results because the bangs are added to the product by us explicitly, and can be interpreted legally as an editorial decision that is actively facilitating that site and its content.

“We operate globally, as do bangs, and products that actively facilitate interaction with illegal content can have us and our employees face significant legal liability, and jeopardizing the entire service,” Tagawa adds.

Not all users are happy with the decision. They point out that some of the removed sites can be used to access legal content as well, such as open source Linux versions. But DuckDuckGo doesn’t want to take any risk.

It is pointed out that users can still achieve the same with other tools. For example, Firefox allows users to create their own search shortcuts, which work pretty much the same as bangs.

Luckily, the TorrentFreak bang has rightfully survived DuckDuckGo’s purge. Also, anyone who’s looking for a recent Linux distribution can still use the ‘!distro’ bang.

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

This week we have five newcomers in our chart.

Venom is the most downloaded movie.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are Web-DL/Webrip/HDRip/BDrip/DVDrip unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the articles of the recent weekly movie download charts.

This week’s most downloaded movies are:

Movie Rank	Rank last week	Movie name	IMDb Rating / Trailer
Most downloaded movies via torrents
1	(…)	Venom	7.0 / trailer
2	(…)	The Predator	5.6 / trailer
3	(…)	The House with a Clock in Its Walls	6.1 / trailer
4	(1)	The Nun	5.5 / trailer
5	(2)	Mission: Impossible – Fallout	8.0 / trailer
6	(3)	Peppermint	6.5 / trailer
7	(…)	Smallfoot	6.7 / trailer
8	(6)	The Equalizer 2	6.9 / trailer
9	(…)	Halloween (Subbed HDRip)	7.0 / trailer
10	(8)	Incredibles 2	8.0 / trailer

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

With online piracy still running rampant, content producers are keen to prevent copying wherever they can.

Music and movies are extremely vulnerable, with no effective technology available after several decades of trying. However, software and video games are able to put up a bit more of a fight when appropriate DRM and other technologies are put in place.

Situated on top of regular DRM, Denuvo has made its way to the top of the pile as one of the most effective and hated (by pirates at least) anti-tamper technologies. This reputation has in part been earned through its ability to prevent low-level crackers from defeating its locks but also due to a perception that it can be anti-consumer.

With this reputation, Denuvo is consistently targeted by crackers, who are getting more and more successful in defeating the technology. A few days’ protection now seems to be the most the product can offer, with the company itself now openly suggesting that a couple of weeks’ protection is a reasonable aim and valuable in itself.

Given Denuvo’s profile, it was interesting to see an apparently new technology being touted by its makers a few months ago. Dubbed ‘Valeroa‘, this new kid on the anti-tamper block seems to have Denuvo in its sights, with interesting marketing which presents the tech as a more consumer-friendly tool to achieve the same aims.

“Valeroa anti-tamper does [not] require you to have an internet connection. Not even when you launch your game for the first time or after you upgraded your hardware. Some games require you to be online, but this is not a Valeroa requirement,” the company claims.

“The protected game behaves as if there is no protection applied at all. Gamers don’t need to re-validate hardware or need an internet connection. They also don’t need to install additional software or drivers. They can play the game as it was intended by the game developer.”

Addressing other complaints usually aimed at Denuvo, Valeroa claims not to continuously write to the gamer’s hard drive while placing no limit on the number of daily installations or changes of hardware.

In common with Denuvo, however, the company behind Valeroa states that its tech is “extremely difficult to crack before and closely after the game release date.”

Curiously, it also adds that the protection “becomes a lot easier to crack after a predefined period” noting that the company has “no problem with organized pirate groups or individuals who crack Valeroa once the protection is weakened.”

This contrasts with statements made on the company’s website back in May (now deleted) that said the following:

“We closely watch the ‘Warez Scene’, P2P and reverse engineering communities. We report criminal activities to legal institutions. Pirate release groups, we know who you are and you have been warned!” the statement read.

On November 29, Valeroa made its debut on the game City Patrol: Police, a racing/action game that doesn’t appear to be particularly popular with early adopters. Doubling up on the disappointment, the Valeroa technology didn’t stand up as promised either.

On Saturday December 1, two days after launch, the game appeared online with its protection cracked. A user known online as ‘Steam006’ (who claims to be from Turkey) was reportedly responsible and if his report is to be believed, Valeroa didn’t put up much of a fight.

“It took about 20 minutes to make the crack,” he announced.

While this rapid defeat was greeted with amusement by the game cracking community, a number of questions about Valeroa remain.

The site itself gives no indication as to who is behind the technology and its domain WHOIS is protected, something which is not common when traditional corporate entities are involved. Its Linkedin page states the company is in the UK, providing a London postcode of EC1 and stating that Valeroa is “almost impossible to crack”.

However, an early version of the website claimed the company was situated in France, offering the address 54-56 Avenue Hoche, Paris 75008.

Adding to the unconventional approach, the site’s promotional material actually carries comments from users of Reddit’s /r/crackwatch forum which stop short of commending the technology but cautiously praise it for being less anti-consumer than some alternatives.

Valeroa cites Crackwatch user? Whatever next..

While Valeroa fell quickly on this first occasion, it did manage to hold up as long as some of the latest variations of Denuvo, which is an achievement in itself, if one discounts the low interest in the game itself.

Whether its strength will improve over time remains to be seen but the people behind the technology, whoever they are, do seem to understand why gamers hate DRM and similar technologies. That is certainly novel, if nothing else.

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

Statistics are great. As long as you have enough data points, you can ‘win’ virtually any argument by citing only those that support your claim.

This technique is used everywhere, also in debates about copyright, especially when it comes to the impact of online file-sharing on revenue.

Rightsholders frequently cite from studies that reveal major losses. At the same time, their opponents pick findings which clearly prove that there is no serious harm. Both may be right, but neither tell the full story.

If you read the headline of this article it’s easy to see that the ‘pro-piracy’ side will gladly put the findings in their arguments folder. However, the same research actually has something in store for anti-piracy advocates as well.

The research we’re referring to is published by Zhuang Liu of the University of Western Ontario, in a paper (pdf) titled “Quantifying the Heterogeneous Effects of Piracy on the Demand for Movies.”

Liu conducted an in-depth study on the link between piracy and sales, using estimated download numbers from pirated torrents as a key variable. This revealed that different types of piracy can have different effects.

After monitoring downloads and sales, including box office and DVD figures, for a period of 40 weeks and comparing it to the tracked piracy activity, he concludes that piracy does impact sales negatively. That said, its effect is far from uniform.

“File sharing reduces the total revenue of the motion picture industry from the box office by $ 231 million in total or 2.71% of the current box office in the US for my sample of 40 weeks in 2015,” the article reads.

On average, piracy results in a loss of roughly $500,000 per movie. That’s not insignificant. The bulk of the harm is not created at the box office though, but with DVD aftersales, the research found.

“Unlike the box office, in the home-video market, DVD revenue decreases by a surprising 36% due to piracy,” Liu writes.

What’s interesting to note is that not all piracy types have the same effect. For the earlier low-quality releases (CAM and TS), the “word-of-mouth” effect outweighs the negative effects on sales. Most of the harm is done by later high-quality leaks (WEBDL, DVDrip and BRRip), which compete directly with DVD and Blu-ray sales.

While the net effect of piracy is negative, pirates can also serve as promoters. Through word-of-mouth ‘advertising’ piracy positively impacts box-office attendance, Liu estimates.

“There’s some benefit from piracy, the word-of-mouth from piracy actually contribute to a total of $68.7 million to the industry box office and DVD revenue,” Liu says, clarifying that the figure applies to a period of 40 weeks and is limited to the US.

There’s another upside of course, as pirates save a lot of money, much more than the movie studios lose. This means that if all piracy could be eradicated, consumer welfare would be ‘lost.’

“Consumer welfare decreases when we ban piracy, which is much higher than the increase in motion picture industry revenue,” Liu notes.

That said, it’s unrealistic to expect that piracy could be banned entirely. Movie studios take down files and sites whenever they can, but a pirated copy is never hard to find. That brings us to another important finding.

If a single movie is protected from piracy successfully, it ‘only’ gains an average $70,000 in additional revenue.

“Consumers who watch pirated movies simply like ‘pirated stuff’, so if studios try to report and remove torrents of a movie on the file-sharing network, the pirate consumers will just switch to other pirated movies. The improvement in revenue will be very small, around $70,000 on average per movie,” Liu tells us.

That last point is important. If all piracy was eliminated, films would see a $500,000 increase in revenue per title. But in more isolated cases, which is what mostly happens today, the effect is much lower.

The research offers several interesting insights, to say the least. However, it is not without shortcomings. As it only looks at BitTorrent traffic, it captures only a small part of the piracy ecosystem.

In addition, tracking torrent downloads accurately also has its challenges. Liu aggregated completed counts form various BitTorrent trackers, which likely means that the downloads are overestimated.

We would caution anyone from drawing strong conclusions from this or any other study. What it does brilliantly show, however, is that not all piracy is the same. The quality and timing of leaked files are crucial, and the effects differ greatly between the box-office and DVD aftersales.

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

There are hundreds of pirate sites online today with many offering a broad range of content. Others prefer to work in a niche, aiming to lure fans of particular media to grow a dedicated following.

In recent months, GoodOldDownloads (GOD) – a site dedicated to gaming – has been growing powerfully, attracting millions of visitors every month. The site built its reputation on trouble-free downloads while trying to make the experience a smooth and safe one for users.

“We looked at other popular game piracy sites and discovered they were all filled with dozens of tracking scripts, infuriating ads (sometimes viruses) and mainly existed for the sole purpose of making money,” the site said in a statement over the weekend.

“In response, we created a website without any of those things and improvements; it was easy to download files, a clean design, and dead links became a thing of the past with the voting system where you could vote to have games re-uploaded automatically. Best of all, almost everything was automated so you didn’t have to rely on some person at their computer to upload files!”

But while a good time was had by all while it lasted, the site has now chosen to relegate itself to the history books. Announcing its closure, the site’s operators cite attacks from competitors and the ever-present threat of legal action as the reasons behind their decision.

“Rival sites started to target us by making threats and claiming they have reported us to anti-piracy corporations. We also want to move on with our lives and enjoy other things without the constant fear of legal action breathing down our necks,” the team confirmed.

As reported here on TF on Saturday, rival pirate sites have recently been making life difficult for each other with various bogus anti-piracy reports, some of which involved GOD.

While it is difficult from the evidence available to definitively point the finger at any particular platforms, it does seem that there’s been a simmering tit-for-tat conflict.

GOD doesn’t indicate specifically who they had problems with but as a parting blow, the platform has taken the unusual step of publishing the results of an ‘investigation’ into the security of two “gaming piracy sites” on its main page.

The report makes for interesting reading but it controversially involves the ‘doxxing’ of individuals said to be behind two popular rival sites, something that rarely ends well.

“The purpose of this document is to summarize information found online that reveals the identity of the individuals that operate the gaming piracy websites ‘igg-games.com’ (http://igg-games.com/) and ‘gamestorrent.co’ (http://gamestorrent.co/) which profit from the distribution of illegal copies of video games via advertisements (pop-up ads, etc). At the time of publication, they are ranked 1,305 and 5,958 globally by Alexa.com,” the report notes.

Predictably, this is causing additional friction and conflict. IGG-Games has already retaliated with the apparent ‘doxxing’ of the alleged operator of GOD and even his alleged family members, something that makes particularly uncomfortable reading.

Due to the hugely private information placed online, we aren’t linking to either report and several gaming piracy discussion forums have also banned their publication. Considering the details published, it’s possible that the fallout from this war of words could have serious implications for all of the parties involved.

While GOD is now bowing out, the site is leaving something behind to cement its legacy. Unlike most defunct platforms that simply fade away, GOD has taken the interesting step of publishing its source code on Github.

“The source code for all our sites is being released under GPLv3. Feel free to fork and improve the project; we have been working on this almost every day for nearly 2 years,” the site’s operators write.

While GOD offering so-called ‘Scene’ releases and specialized in offering titles from official distributor platform GoodOldGames, GoodOldDownloads recently made the headlines after stepping into a freshly turbulent area of the gaming scene.

After Nintendo filed a complaint at a federal court in Arizona, accusing gaming sites LoveROMS.com and LoveRETRO.co of massive copyright and trademark infringement, a domino effect rippled through the retro-gaming community, with other sites choosing to close down rather than share the same fate.

In response, however, GoodOldDownloads decided to fill the gaps in the market by directly challenging Nintendo with the launch of a retro-gaming section on the site.

While the move was celebrated by fans, this weekend’s shutdown means that the initiative has now come to an end, along with everything else the site offered. Considering the tit-for-tat ‘doxxing’, however, this might not be the last we hear of this controversial affair.

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