For a niche that has had millions of words written about it over the past 18 years or so, most big piracy stories have had the emotions of people at their core.

When The Pirate Bay was taken down by the police eleven years ago it was global news, but the real story was the sense of disbelief and loss felt by millions of former users. Outsiders may dismiss these feelings, but they are very common and very real.

Of course, those negative emotions soon turned to glee when the site returned days later, but full-on, genuine resurrections are something that few big sites have been able to pull off since. What we have instead today is the sudden disappearance of iconic sites and a scrambling by third-party opportunists to fill in the gaps with look-a-like platforms.

The phenomenon has affected many big sites, from The Pirate Bay itself through to KickassTorrents, YTS/YIFY, and more recently, ExtraTorrent. When sites disappear, it’s natural for former users to look for replacements. And when those replacements look just like the real deal there’s a certain amount of comfort to be had. For many users, these sites provide the perfect antidote to their feelings of loss.

That being said, the clone site phenomenon has seriously got out of hand. Pioneered by players in the streaming site scene, fake torrent sites can now be found in abundance wherever there is a brand worth copying. ExtraTorrent operator SaM knew this when he closed his site last month, and he took the time to warn people away from them personally.

“Stay away from fake ExtraTorrent websites and clones,” he said.

It’s questionable how many listened.

Within days, users were flooding to fake ExtraTorrent sites, encouraged by some elements of the press. Despite having previously reported SaM’s clear warnings, some publications were still happy to report that ExtraTorrent was back, purely based on the word of the fake sites themselves. And I’ve got a bridge for sale, if you have the cash.

While misleading news reports must take some responsibility, it’s clear that when big sites go down a kind of grieving process takes place among dedicated former users, making some more likely to clutch at straws. While some simply move on, others who have grown more attached to a platform they used to call home can go into denial.

This reaction has often been seen in TF’s mailbox, when YTS/YIFY went down in particular. More recently, dozens of emails informed us that ExtraTorrent had gone, with many others asking when it was coming back. But the ones that stood out most were from people who had read SaM’s message, read TF’s article stating that ALL clones were fakes, yet still wanted to know if sites a, b and c were legitimate or not.

We approached a user on Reddit who asked similar things and been derided by other users for his apparent reluctance to accept that ExtraTorrent had gone. We didn’t find stupidity (as a few in /r/piracy had cruelly suggested) but a genuine sense of loss.

“I loved the site dude, what can I say?” he told TF. “Just kinda got used to it and hung around. Before I knew it I was logging in every day. In time it just felt like home. I miss it.”

The user hadn’t seen the articles claiming that one of the imposter ExtraTorrent sites was the real deal. He did, however, seem a bit unsettled when we told him it was a fake. But when we asked if he was going to stop using it, we received an emphatic “no”.

“Dude it looks like ET and yeah it’s not quite the same but I can get my torrents. Why does it matter what crew [runs it]?” he said.

It does matter, of course. The loss of a proper torrent site like ExtraTorrent, which had releasers and a community, can never be replaced by a custom-skinned Pirate Bay mirror. No matter how much it looks like a lost friend, it’s actually a pig in lipstick that contributes little to the ecosystem.

That being said, it’s difficult to counter the fact that some of these clones make people happy. They fill a void that other sites, for mainly cosmetic reasons, can’t fill. With this in mind, the grounds for criticism weaken a little – but not much.

For anyone who has watched the Black Mirror episode ‘Be Right Back‘, it’s clear that sudden loss can be a hard thing for humans to accept. When trying to fill the gap, what might initially seem like a good replacement is almost certainly destined to disappoint longer term, when the sub-standard copy fails to capture the heart and soul of the real deal.

It’s an issue that will occupy the piracy scene for some time to come, but interestingly, it’s also an argument that Hollywood has used against piracy itself for decades. But that’s another story.

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

One of the core pillars of academic research is sharing.

By letting other researchers know what you do, ideas are criticized, improved upon and extended. In today’s digital age, sharing is easier than ever before, especially with help from torrents.

One of the leading scientific projects that has adopted BitTorrent is the developing Human Connectome Project, or dHCP for short. The goal of the project is to map the brain wiring of developing babies in the wombs of their mothers.

To do so, a consortium of researchers with expertise ranging from computer science, to MRI physics and clinical medicine, has teamed up across three British institutions: Imperial College London, King’s College London and the University of Oxford.

The collected data is extremely valuable for the neuroscience community and the project has received mainstream press coverage and financial backing from the European Union Research Council. Not only to build the dataset, but also to share it with researchers around the globe. This is where BitTorrent comes in.

Sharing more than 150 GB of data with researchers all over the world can be quite a challenge. Regular HTTP downloads are not really up to the task, and many other transfer options have a high failure rate.

Baby brain scan (Credit: Developing Human Connectome Project)

This is why Jonathan Passerat-Palmbach, Research Associate Department of Computing Imperial College London, came up with the idea to embrace BitTorrent instead.

“For me, it was a no-brainer from day one that we couldn’t rely on plain old HTTP to make this dataset available. Our first pilot release is 150GB, and I expect the next ones to reach a couple of TB. Torrents seemed like the de facto solution to share this data with the world’s scientific community.” Passerat-Palmbach says.

The researchers opted to go for the Academic Torrents tracker, which specializes in sharing research data. A torrent with the first batch of images was made available there a few weeks ago.

“This initial release contains 3,629 files accounting for 167.20GB of data. While this figure might not appear extremely large at the moment, it will significantly grow as the project aims to make the data of 1,000 subjects available by the time it has completed.”

Torrent of the first dataset

The download numbers are nowhere in the region of an average Hollywood blockbuster, of course. Thus far the tracker has registered just 28 downloads. That said, as a superior and open file-transfer protocol, BitTorrent does aid in critical research that helps researchers to discover more about the development of conditions such as ADHD and autism.

Interestingly, the biggest challenges of implementing the torrent solution were not of a technical nature. Most time and effort went into assuring other team members that this was the right solution.

“I had to push for more than a year for the adoption of torrents within the consortium. While my colleagues could understand the potential of the approach and its technical inputs, they remained skeptical as to the feasibility to implement such a solution within an academic context and its reception by the world community.

“However, when the first dataset was put together, amounting to 150GB, it became obvious all the HTTP and FTP fallback plans would not fit our needs,” Passerat-Palmbach adds.

Baby brain scans (Credit: Developing Human Connectome Project)

When the consortium finally agreed that BitTorrent was an acceptable way to share the data, local IT staff at the university had to give their seal of approval. Imperial College London doesn’t allow torrent traffic to flow freely across the network, so an exception had to be made.

“Torrents are blocked across the wireless and VPN networks at Imperial. Getting an explicit firewall exception created for our seeding machine was not a walk in the park. It was the first time they were faced with such a situation and we were clearly told that it was not to become the rule.”

Then, finally, the data could be shared around the world.

While BitTorrent is probably the most efficient way to share large files, there were other proprietary solutions that could do the same. However, Passerat-Palmbach preferred not to force other researchers to install “proprietary black boxes” on their machines.

Torrents are free and open, which is more in line with the Open Access approach more academics take today.

Looking back, it certainly wasn’t a walk in the park to share the data via BitTorrent. Passerat-Palmbach was frequently confronted with the piracy stigma torrents have amoung many of his peers, even among younger generations.

“Considering how hard it was to convince my colleagues within the project to actually share this dataset using torrents (‘isn’t it illegal?’ and other kinds of misconceptions…), I think there’s still a lot of work to do to demystify the use of torrents with the public.

“I was even surprised to see that these misconceptions spread out not only to more senior scientists but also to junior researchers who I was expecting to be more tech-aware,” Passerat-Palmbach adds.

That said, the hard work is done now and in the months and years ahead the neuroscience community will have access to Petabytes of important data, with help from BitTorrent. That is definitely worth the effort.

Finally, we thought it was fitting to end with Passerat-Palmbach’s “pledge to seed,” which he shared with his peers. Keep on sharing!

—

On the importance of seeding

Dear fellow scientist,

Thank for you very much for the interest you are showing in the dHCP dataset!

Once you start downloading the dataset, you’ll notice that your torrent client mentions a sharing / seeding ratio. It means that as soon as you start downloading the dataset, you become part of our community of sharers and contribute to making the dataset available to other researchers all around the world!

There’s no reason to be scared! It’s perfectly legal as long as you’re allowed to have a copy of the dataset (that’s the bit you need to forward to your lab’s IT staff if they’re blocking your ports).

You’re actually providing a tremendous contribution to dHCP by spreading the data, so thank you again for that!

With your help, we can make sure this data remains available and can be downloaded relatively fast in the future. Over time, the dataset will grow and your contribution will be more and more important so that each and everyone of you can still obtain the data in the smoothest possible way.

We cannot do it without you. By seeding, you’re actually saying “cheers!” to your peers whom you downloaded your data from. So leave your client open and stay tuned!

All this is made possible thanks to the amazing folks at academictorrents and their infrastructure, so kudos academictorrents!

You can learn more about their project here and get some help to get started with torrent downloading here.

Jonathan Passerat-Palmbach

—

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

Nagravision or NAGRA is one of the best known companies operating in the digital cable and satellite television content security space. Due to successes spanning several decades, the company has often proven unpopular with pirates.

In particular, Nagravision encryption systems have regularly been a hot topic for discussion on cable and satellite hacking forums, frustrating those looking to receive pay TV services without paying the high prices associated with them. However, the rise of the Internet is now presenting new challenges.

NAGRA still protects traditional cable and satellite pay TV services in 2017; Virgin Media in the UK is a long-standing customer, for example. But the rise of Internet streaming means that pirate content can now be delivered to the home with ease, completely bypassing the entire pay TV provider infrastructure. And, by extension, NAGRA’s encryption.

This means that NAGRA has been required to spread its wings.

As reported in April, NAGRA is establishing a lab to monitor and detect unauthorized consumption of content via set-top boxes, websites and other streaming platforms. That covers the now omnipresent Kodi phenomenon, alongside premium illicit IPTV services. TorrentFreak caught up with the company this week to find out more.

“NAGRA has an automated monitoring platform that scans all live channels and VOD assets available on Kodi,” NAGRA’s Ivan Schnider informs TF.

“The service we offer to our customers automatically finds illegal distribution of their content on Kodi and removes infringing streams.”

In the first instance, NAGRA sends standard takedown notices to hosting services to terminate illicit streams. The company says that while some companies are very cooperative, others are less so. When meeting resistance, NAGRA switches to more coercive methods, described here by Christopher Schouten, NAGRA Senior Director Product Marketing.

“Takedowns are generally sent to streaming platforms and hosting servers. When those don’t work, Advanced Takedowns allow us to use both technical and legal means to get results,” Schouten says.

“Numerous stories in recent days show how for instance popular Kodi plug-ins have been removed by their authors because of the mere threat of legal actions like this.”

At the center of operations is NAGRA’s Piracy Intelligence Portal, which offers customers a real-time view of worldwide online piracy trends, information on the infrastructure behind illegal services, as well as statistics and status of takedown requests.

“We measure takedown compliance very carefully using our Piracy Intelligence Portal, so we can usually predict the results we will get. We work on a daily basis to improve relationships and interfaces with those who are less compliant,” Schouten says.

The Piracy Intelligence Portal

While persuasion is probably the best solution, some hosts inevitably refuse to cooperate. However, NAGRA also offers the NexGuard system, which is able to determine the original source of the content.

“Using forensic watermarking to trace the source of the leak, we will be able to completely shut down the ‘leak’ at the source, independently and within minutes of detection,” Schouten says.

Whatever route is taken, NAGRA says that the aim is to take down streams as quickly as possible, something which hopefully undermines confidence in pirate services and encourages users to re-enter the legal market. Interestingly, the company also says it uses “technical means” to degrade pirate services to the point that consumers lose faith in them.

But while augmented Kodi setups and illicit IPTV are certainly considered a major threat in 2017, they are not the only problem faced by content companies.

While the Apple platform is quite tight, the open nature of Android means that there are a rising number of apps that can be sideloaded from the web. These allow pirate content to be consumed quickly and conveniently within a glossy interface.

Apps like Showbox, MovieHD and Terrarium TV have the movie and TV show sector wrapped up, while the popular Mobdro achieves the same with live TV, including premium sports. Schnider says NAGRA can handle apps like these and other emerging threats in a variety of ways.

“In addition to Kodi-related anti-piracy activities, NAGRA offers a service that automatically finds illegal distribution of content on Android applications, fully loaded STBs, M3U playlist and other platforms that provide plug-and-play solutions for the big TV screen; this service also includes the removal of infringing streams,” he explains.

M3U playlist piracy doesn’t get a lot of press. An M3U file is a text file that specifies locations where content (such as streams) can be found online.

In its basic ‘free’ form, it’s simply a case of finding an M3U file on an indexing site or blog and loading it into VLC. It’s not as flashy as any of the above apps, and unless one knows where to get the free M3Us quickly, many channels may already be offline. Premium M3U files are widely available, however, and tend to be pretty reliable.

But while attacking sources of infringing content is clearly a big part of NAGRA’s mission, the company also deploys softer strategies for dealing with pirates.

“Beyond disrupting pirate streams, raising awareness amongst users that these services are illegal and helping service providers deliver competing legitimate services, are also key areas in the fight against premium IPTV piracy where NAGRA can help,” Schnider says.

“Converting users of such services to legitimate paying subscribers represents a significant opportunity for content owners and distributors.”

For this to succeed, Schouten says there needs to be an understanding of the different motivators that lead an individual to commit piracy.

“Is it price? Is it availability? Is it functionality?” he asks.

Interestingly, he also reveals that lots of people are spending large sums of money on IPTV services they believe are legal but are not. Rather than the high prices putting them off, they actually add to their air of legitimacy.

“These consumers can relatively easily be converted into paying subscribers if they can be convinced that pay-TV services offer superior quality, reliability, and convenience because let’s face it, most IPTV services are still a little dodgy to use,” he says.

“Education is also important; done through working with service providers to inform consumers through social media platforms of the risks linked to the use of illegitimate streaming devices / IPTV devices, e.g. purchasing boxes that may no longer work after a short period of time.”

And so the battle over content continues.

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

Piracy remains a major threat for the movie industry, MPA Stan McCoy said yesterday during a panel session at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

After McCoy praised the collaboration between the MPA(A) and Russian authorities in their fight against online piracy, the ‎President and Managing Director of the MPA’s EMEA region noted that pirates are not standing still.

Much like Hollywood, copyright infringers are innovators who constantly change their “business models” and means of obtaining content. Where torrents were dominant a few years ago, illegal streaming devices are now the main threat, with McCoy describing their rise as Piracy 3.0.

“Piracy is not a static challenge. The pirates are great innovators in their own right. So even as we innovate in trying to pursue these issues, and pursue novel ways of fighting piracy, the pirates are out there coming up with new business models of their own,” McCoy said.

“If you think of old-fashioned peer-to-peer piracy as 1.0, and then online illegal streaming websites as 2.0, in the audio-visual sector, in particular, we now face challenge number 3.0, which is what I’ll call the challenge of illegal streaming devices.”

The panel

The MPA boss went on to explain how the new piracy ecosystem works. The new breed of pirates relies on streaming devices such as set-top boxes, which often run Kodi and are filled with pirate add-ons.

This opens the door to a virtually unlimited library of pirated content. For one movie there may be hundreds of pirate links available, which are impossible to take down in an effective manner by rightsholders, he added, while showcasing the Exodus add-on to the public.

McCoy stressed that the devices themselves, and software such as Kodi, are ‘probably’ not illegal. However, the addition of copyright-infringing pirate add-ons turns them into an unprecedented piracy threat.

“The device itself is probably not illegal, the software itself is probably not illegal, the confluence of all three of these is a major category killer for online piracy,” McCoy said.

McCoy showing Exodus

McCoy went on to say that the new “Piracy 3.0” is not that popular in Russia yet. However, in the UK, America, and several other countries, it’s already huge, matching the popularity of legal services such as Spotify.

“The result is a pirate service operating on a truly massive scale. The scale of this kind of piracy, while it’s not huge yet in the Russian Federation, has reached epidemic levels similar to major services like Spotify, in markets like the UK, and other markets in Western Europe and North America.”

“This is a new sort of global Netflix but no rightsholder gets paid,” McCoy added.

The MPA chief stresses that this new form of piracy should be dealt with through a variety of measures including legislation, regulation, consumer education, and voluntary agreements with third-party stakeholders.

He notes that in Europe, rightsholders are backed by a recent decision of the Court of Justice, which outlawed the sales of devices with pre-loaded pirate add-ons. However, there is still a lot more work to be done to crack down on this emerging piracy threat.

“This is an area where […] innovative responses are required. We have to be just as good as the pirates in thinking of new ways to tackle these challenges,” McCoy said.

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

Like many games in recent times, indie title RiME uses Denuvo anti-piracy technology to keep the swashbucklers away. It won’t stay that way for long.

Earlier this week, RiME developer Tequila Works grabbed a few headlines after stating it would remove the Denuvo protection from its game, should it fall to crackers.

“I have seen some conversations about our use of Denuvo anti-tamper, and I wanted to take a moment to address it,” RiME community manager Dariuas wrote on Steam forums.

“RiME is a very personal experience told through both sight and sound. When a game is cracked, it runs the risk of creating issues with both of those items, and we want to do everything we can to preserve this quality in RiME.”

Dariuas concluded that a Denuvo-free version of RiME would be released if the game was cracked. Within days of the announcement and right on cue, pirates struck.

In a fanfare of celebrations, rising cracking star Baldman announced that he had defeated the latest v4+ iteration of Denuvo and dumped a cracked copy of RiME online. While encouraging people to buy what he describes as a “super nice” game, Baldman was less complimentary about Denuvo.

Labeling the anti-tamper technology a “huge abomination,” the cracker said that Denuvo’s creators had really upped their efforts this time out. People like Baldman who work on Denuvo talk of the protection calling on code ‘triggers.’ For RiME, things were reportedly amped up to 11.

“In Rime that ugly creature went out of control – how do you like three fucking hundreds of THOUSANDS calls to ‘triggers’ during initial game launch and savegame loading? Did you wonder why game loading times are so long – here is the answer,” Baldman explained.

“In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1000 ‘triggers’ called, so we have x300 here.”

But according to the cracker, the 300,000 calls to triggers was a mere “warmup” for Denuvo. After just 30 minutes of gameplay, the count rose to two million, a figure he delivered with shocked expletives.

One of the main points of criticism for protections like Denuvo is that they take a toll on both game performance and gaming hardware. Baldman, who speaks English as a second language, reports that in RiME things have got massively out of hand which negatively affects the game.

“Protection now calls about 10-30 triggers every second during actual gameplay, slowing game down. In previous games like Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3, NieR Automata, Prey there were only about 1-2 ‘triggers’ called every several minutes during gameplay, so do the math.”

Only making matters worse, the cracker says, is the fact the triggers are heavily obfuscated under a virtual machine, which further affects performance. However, thanks to RiME’s developers making good on their word, any protection-related problems will soon be a thing of the past.

“Today, we got word that there was a crack which would bypass Denuvo,” Dariuas wrote last night.

“Upon receiving this news, we worked to test this and verify that it was, in fact, the case. We have now confirmed that it is. As such, we at [publisher] Team Grey Box are following through on our promise from earlier this week that we will be replacing the current build of RiME with one that does not contain Denuvo.”

So while gamers wait for Denuvo to get stripped from RiME and pirates celebrate, the company behind the anti-piracy technology will be considering its options. If what Baldman claims is true, it sounds like more than just a little desperation is in the air.

Worryingly for Denuvo, not even throwing the kitchen sink at the problem has had much effect.

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