As one of the oldest torrent communities online, the semi-private Demonoid tracker has had its fair share of troubles over the years.

The site has gone offline on several occasions in the past. Most notable was the 20 months downtime streak, which began in 2012 following a DDoS attack and legal troubles in Ukraine.

Since then Demonoid has slowly but steadily rebuilt its community up to a point where it now has millions of visitors per month, bringing it back into the range of the largest torrent sites once again.

However, to the surprise of many, the site went dark again earlier this week. People who try to access the latest Dnoid.me domain will see that nothing is coming up at all.

Initially, the downtime was little to worry about. On Tuesday the Demonoid crew announced that there was going to be a planned server change, cautioning users not to panic.

Don’t panic

Not everyone had seen the announcement though, and for those who did see it, an outage of two full days for a server move seemed a bit much.

To find out more, TorrentFreak reached out to the Demonoid team via the official Twitter account. They informed us that they’ve run into some unforeseen problems, but nothing that can’t be overcome.

The team is currently working on a fix and they hope to bring the site back online as soon as possible. But, depending now how things go, it may take a couple of extra days. The team made clear that there are no legal issues, but for now they prefer to keep the finer details in-house.

The above makes it clear that Demonoid users have no other option than to patiently wait until the site returns, or find an alternative for the time being.

This is easier said than done for some. While the active Demonoid community is a bit smaller now than it was at its height, it is still a prime location for users who are sharing more obscure content that’s hard to find on public sites.

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

So-called copyright trolling is a plague sweeping across the world and there seems to be very little anyone can do to stop it. Claiming that their rights have been infringed, copyright holders head to court to demand the identities of subscribers behind IP addresses and from there they begin their threats.

One of the more recent countries to be hit with the phenomenon is Finland, where the practice seriously got underway in 2014 and escalated in 2015.

It’s now emerged that tens of thousands of citizens are likely to be caught up in a new dragnet following their alleged sharing of movies and TV shows.

A copy of a letter recently sent to an Internet subscriber and obtained by Helsingin Sanomat reveals a demand for 2,200 euros relating to the downloading of a TV show. But this single letter is just the tip of the iceberg.

Last year a local court dealt with around 200 cases that concluded with copyright holders being granted permission to obtain the identities of between hundreds and thousands of individuals said to have infringed their rights.

HS estimates that as many as 60,000 people could be in line to receive cash demands similar to the one detailed above. They come from Hedman Partners, the Helsinki law firm that’s been involved in copyright trolling cases in Finland for the past couple of years.

Based on a 2,200 euro settlement, the cash involved is potentially enormous. For every hundred cases settled, the law firm reportedly pockets 130,000 euros for “monitoring costs”, with 90,000 euros going to the rightsholders.

Due to the scale of the problem, complaints from letter recipients are now being reported to various local authorities. After receiving dozens of complaints from bewildered Internet account holders, police were forced to issue a statement last Friday.

“Based on notification of data there is no reason to suspect a crime. The mere lack of clarity associated with the invoice-based letter, for example, does not prove the crime of fraud or an intention to deliberate deceive,” said Detective Chief Inspector Taija Kostamo.

Kostamo also noted that since the dispute is one based in civil law, the police will not be getting involved in any investigation.

“The police are not the competent authority to solve this issue,” he said, adding that citizens should take steps to secure their Wi-Fi networks to avoid third-party intrusions.

With the police backing away from any involvement, expectations have now fallen on the government to tackle the problem. Thankfully for those involved, the Ministry of Education and Culture appears to be taking the matter seriously and has promised an investigation.

“It is not intended that our legislation should be used for milking [the public],” said ‎Government Counsellor Anna Vuopala.

“It seems that it is appropriate for the Ministry to convene the parties involved in order to find out whether the law is being complied with in all respects,” she said.

Local copyright law obliges ISPs to hand over account holders’ names if copyrighted content has been shared without permission to a “significant degree.” There is now some debate over whether the sharing of a movie or TV show meets that threshold.

With a meeting planned for February, the issue has now attracted the attention of parliament. HS reports that various Members of Parliament are looking into the matter to clarify the position and look at what can be done to deal with the problems raised.

The situation emerging in Finland is a prime example of what happens when large numbers of people are targeted at once. While a few hundred cases might fly somewhat under the radar and fade away relatively quickly, tens of thousands aren’t going to be brushed under the carpet. Trolling has now become a national issue, with all of the consequences that will entail.

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

There was a time when the Internet was a fairly straightforward place to navigate, with basic software, basic websites and few major security issues. Over the years, however, things have drastically changed.

Many people now spend their entire lives connected to the web in some way, particularly via mobile devices and apps such as Facebook and the countless thousands of others now freely available online.

For some users, the idea of encrypting their traffic has become attractive, from both a security and anti-censorship standpoint. On the one hand people like the idea of private communications and on the other, encryption can enable people to bypass website blocks, wherever they may occur and for whatever reason.

As a result, millions are now turning to premium VPN packages from reputable companies. Others, however, prefer to use the all-in-one options available on Google’s Play store, but according to a new study, that could be a risky strategy.

A study by researchers at CSIRO’s Data 61, University of New South Wales, and UC Berkley, has found that hundreds of VPN apps available from Google Play presented significant security issues including malware, spyware, adware and data leaks.

Very often, users look at the number of downloads combined with the ‘star rating’ of apps to work out whether they’re getting a good product. However, the researchers found that among the 283 apps tested, even the highest ranked and most-downloaded apps can carry nasty surprises.

“While 37% of the analyzed VPN apps have more than 500K installs and 25% of them receive at least a 4-star rating, over 38% of them contain some malware presence according to VirusTotal,” the researchers write.

The five types of malware detected can be broken down as follows: Adware (43%), Trojan (29%), Malvertising (17%), Riskware (6%) and Spyware (5%). The researchers ordered the most problematic apps by VirusTotal AV-Rank, which represents the number of anti-virus tools that identified any malware activity.

The worst offenders, according to the report

The researchers found that only a marginal number of VPN users raised any security or privacy concerns in the review sections for each app, despite many of them having serious problems. The high number of downloads seem to suggest that users have confidence in them, despite their issues.

“According to the number of installs of these apps, millions of users appear to trust VPN apps despite their potential maliciousness. In fact, the high presence of malware activity in VPN apps that our analysis has revealed is worrisome given the ability that these apps already have to inspect and analyze all user’s traffic with the VPN permission,” the paper reads.

The growing awareness of VPNs and their association with privacy and security has been a hot topic in recent years, but the researchers found that many of the apps available on Google Play offer neither. Instead, they featured tracking of users by third parties while demanding access to sensitive Android permissions.

“Even though 67% of the identified VPN Android apps offer services to enhance online privacy and security, 75% of them use third-party tracking libraries and 82% request permissions to access sensitive resources including user accounts and text messages,” the researchers note.

Even from this low point, things manage to get worse. Many VPN users associate the product they’re using with encryption and the privacy it brings, but for almost one-fifth of apps tested by the researchers, the concept is alien.

“18% of the VPN apps implement tunneling protocols without encryption despite promising online anonymity and security to their users,” they write, adding that 16% of tested apps routed traffic through other users of the same app rather than utilizing dedicated online servers.

“This forwarding model raises a number of trust, security, and privacy concerns for participating users,” the researchers add, noting that only Hola admits to the practice on its website.

And when it comes to the handling of IPv6 traffic, the majority of the apps featured in the study fell short in a dramatic way. Around 84% of the VPN apps tested had IPv6 leaks while 66% had DNS leaks, something the researchers put down to misconfigurations or developer-induced errors.

“Both the lack of strong encryption and traffic leakages can ease online tracking activities performed by inpath middleboxes (e.g., commercial WiFi [Access Points] harvesting user’s data) and by surveillance agencies,” they warn.

While the study (pdf) is detailed, it does not attempt to rank any of the applications tested, other than showing a table of some of the worst offenders. From the perspective of the consumer looking to install a good VPN app, that’s possibly not as helpful as they might like.

Instead, those looking for a VPN will have to carry out their own research online before taking the plunge. Sticking with well-known companies that are transparent about their practices is a great start. And, if an app requests access to sensitive data during the install process for no good reason, get rid of it. Finally, if it’s a free app with a free service included, it’s a fair assumption that strings may be attached.

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

In an effort to lower piracy rates in the UK, rightsholders have reached an agreement with leading ISPs to send “educational emails” to alleged copyright infringers.

The initiative, branded the “Get It Right” program, is expected to start any day now. In anticipation of the launch, the campaign’s official information portal has quietly been made available online.

It is expected that the emails will point suspected copyright infringers to this site where they can find pretty much any answer they need about the campaign. “Are you monitoring my online activity,” for example, or “Will this programme shut down my internet connection?”

We have covered most of these topics already in our earlier overview, but there is some new information as well. For example, it turns out that after an Internet subscriber receives a warning email, there is a 20-day grace period before they’ll receive another.

“After an Educational Email has been sent, there is a 20 day grace period during which time you will not receive any further emails. However, if further copyright infringement activity occurs and is detected after the 20 day grace period, you may receive another email from your ISP,” the FAQ reads.

Almost three weeks is significantly longer than the 7-days the U.S. equivalent has. Also good to know is that if no other piracy incidents are recorded in the future, all data is scrapped from the database after 12 months.

“If no further infringements occur and are detected and verified to be associated with your account, you will receive no more Educational Emails. Furthermore, all data related to this and to previous Educational Emails will be deleted after 12 months.”

Of course, it is pretty much irrelevant how many emails subscribers receive, as there’s no ‘stick’ involved. Even after more than a dozen warnings, ISPs are not handing down any penalties or punishments as part of the “Get It Right” campaign.

Another piece of new information is the fact that NOW TV (owned by Sky) and PlusNet (owned by BT) are now listed among the ISPs that will send out warning emails. Previously only BT, Sky, Talk-Talk and Virgin Media were mentioned publicly.

Overall the information portal does a pretty good job at answering the most poignant questions. It even lists several videos, partly ‘copied’ from the U.S. Copyright Alert System, to show how they work and how people to secure their wireless network, for example.

How people are tracked

What appears to be lacking is an official appeal process. From what we can see there is no option to dispute an infringement claim. Then again, this shouldn’t lead to any problems since people are not directly at risk of being punished under the program.

Finally, the makers of the information portal appear to be living in the past as the terms “shared” and “sharing” folder are mentioned on a few occasions, even in one of the educational videos.

This “shared folder” terminology refers to dated or defunct peer-to-peer applications such as Limewire (which is also mentioned) while the “Get It Right” campaign mostly focuses on torrent transfers.

BT made a similar mistake in their advisory last week, but the ISP swiftly updated its information after we pointed it out.

It will be interesting to see how the public will respond to the notices. ISPs and rightsholders have agreed to cap the number of emails at 2.5 million per year, and the program will stay active for a minimum of three years.

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

Over the years, adult image publisher Perfect 10 developed a reputation for making a business out of suing Internet services for alleged copyright infringement.

The company targeted Google, Amazon, MasterCard and Visa, even hosting providers such as LeaseWeb and OVH. After securing several private settlements in earlier actions, the company sued Usenet provider Giganews after Perfect 10 images appeared on Giganews servers. Things didn’t go well.

In November 2014, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California found that Giganews was not liable for the infringing activities of its users. Perfect 10 was subsequently ordered to pay Giganews $5.6m in attorney’s fees and costs.

With Perfect 10 not quite done the case went to appeal, but in an opinion just handed down by the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, the adult publisher has received a crushing defeat. The panel held that to be held liable for direct copyright infringement, Giganews must have committed some voluntary act that caused the infringement to occur. The requirements for such “volitional conduct” were not met.

“The panel concluded that the evidence showed only that Giganews’ actions were akin to passively storing material at the direction of users in order to make that material available to other users upon request, or automatically copying, storing, and transmitting materials upon instigation by others,” the ruling reads.

The panel also found that Giganews was not liable for contributory infringement after Perfect 10 failed to show that Giganews “materially contributed to or induced infringement.”

On Perfect 10’s claim for vicarious infringement, the panel upheld the district court’s summary judgment in Giganews’ favor, noting that Perfect 10 failed to show a “causal link between the infringing activities and a financial benefit to Giganews.”

Ron Yokubaitis, Co-CEO of Giganews, said that his company’s decision not to give in to Perfect 10 had resulted in a long and hard-fought battle, but the end result meant it had been worth it.

“We decided that it would be important to stand up to Perfect 10 and not be bullied by its abusive litigation tactics.  We were not going to settle this case just to avoid the risk of potentially catastrophic statutory damages in today’s crazy copyright world, a threat that unscrupulous plaintiffs like Perfect 10 use to extract unjust settlements from more timid companies,” he said.

“We took a stand for Usenet, for technology and online platforms, for the public, and for ultimate benefit of rational copyright law.  We were not just battling Perfect 10:  standing behind Perfect 10 – and even sharing in its oral argument at the court of appeals – was the Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA), which tried to argue that it was voicing the interests of small copyright holders.”

Giganews went on to thank several groups that gave it support during its battle with Perfect 10, including the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, EFF, and Public Knowledge. While Giganews will continue in the Usenet business, Perfect 10’s efforts to extract billions in damages from the provider have essentially developed into a suicide mission.

“With this decision, Perfect 10’s days as a copyright troll masquerading as a porn company are now finished,” Giganews said.

“The case now moves to its final stage to collect attorney’s fees from Perfect 10.  Giganews is seeking the appointment of a receiver to take charge of all of Perfect 10’s copyrights, trademarks, and domain names and to liquidate them in partial satisfaction of Giganews’ judgment against Perfect 10.”

The only area where Giganews failed to convince the court was in its request to add Perfect 10 founder Norman Zada to the verdict. The district court already denied that request and the panel at the court of appeal upheld that decision.

The full ruling is available here

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