This episode we are joined by Mike Masnick – CEO & Editor of Techdirt, and Evan Engstrom, Executive Director of Engine.  

This episode we discuss the extraordinary growth of academic filesharing site SciHub, the new Zeronet distributed torrent application Play, and yet another comeback from Popcorn Time.

In addition, we talk about the plague of DMCA takedown notices afflicting YouTube creators and why the law might not survive the acceleration of the digital media landscape… in its present form.

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Steal This Show aims to release bi-weekly episodes featuring insiders discussing copyright and file-sharing news. It complements our regular reporting by adding more room for opinion, commentary and analysis.

The guests for our news discussions will vary and we’ll aim to introduce voices from different backgrounds and persuasions. In addition to news, STS will also produce features interviewing some of the great innovators and minds.

Host: Jamie King

Guess: Mike Masnick and Evan Engstrom.

Produced by Jamie King
Edited & Mixed by Eric Bouthiller
Original Music by David Triana
Web Production by Siraje Amarniss

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

Like many other countries around the world, downloading music and movies is hugely popular in the Netherlands.

In part, the popularity was facilitated by the fact that downloading pirated music has long been legal under local law.

This tolerant stance towards online piracy changed in 2014 when the European Court of Justice ruled it to be unlawful. As a result the Dutch Government quickly outlawed unauthorized downloading.

Breaking the habits of a large section of the population will take more than that though, as local piracy rates remain high, which is a thorn in the side of the movie industry.

Earlier this year the Association of Professional Film Entrepreneurs (VPSO) decided to take action. In a letter sent to Secretary of State for Justice they held the Government responsible for their piracy losses.

In addition to tougher anti-piracy measures, the film industry group also claimed 1.2 billion euros ($1.34 billion) as compensation for the piracy losses they claim to have suffered since 2004.

However, the Dutch Government has no intention of paying up. NU reports that the Attorney for the Dutch state sent a letter to VPSO denying responsibility for the cited losses.

According to Minister of Safety and Justice Ard van der Steur, who informed the Dutch House of Representatives about this issue late last week, the Government hasn’t done anything wrong.

“The State does not consider itself liable for the damage VPSO allegedly suffered by VPSO. Contrary to VPSO’s claims, the Copyright Directive wasn’t applied incorrectly, so there’s no question of illegality,” he writes.

In addition, there are doubts about the link between piracy and losses as well as the claimed height of the damages.

“In addition, there are other critical notes that can be placed alongside VPSO’s alleged claim, such as the statute of limitations, the absence of a causal relationship, as well as the height of the allegedly suffered damages,” Van der Steur adds.

Instead of holding the State responsible, the film companies were told that they have plenty of legal options to recoup their losses through civil procedures, a suggestion that they should go after downloaders instead.

While the Dutch Government denies responsibility, the Justice Minister says they are willing to discuss possible enforcement options with Internet providers and film representatives, to better deter piracy going forward.

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

This week we have two newcomers in our chart.

Kung Fu Panda 3 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 BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise.

RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.

Ranking	(last week)	Movie	IMDb Rating / Trailer
torrentfreak.com
1	(2)	Kung Fu Panda 3 (Webrip)	8.0 / trailer
2	(1)	Deadpool (HDTS)	8.6 / trailer
3	(…)	The Hateful Eight	8.0 / trailer
4	(4)	The Big Short	8.1 / trailer
5	(9)	The Revenant (DVDscr)	8.2 / trailer
6	(3)	Victor Frankenstein	6.1 / trailer
7	(…)	Gods of Egypt (HDTS)	5.7 / trailer
8	(6)	Spectre	7.9 / trailer
9	(5)	Creed	8.0 / trailer
10	(7)	Ride Along 2	5.8 / trailer

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

With millions of active users, Transmission is one of the most used BitTorrent clients around, particularly for Mac users.

The application has been around for more than a decade and has a great reputation. However, this weekend several users started to report malware problems in the Transmission forums.

The malware in question was identified as “OSX.KeRanger.A” and several users reported that it’s linked to Transmission 2.90.

Today, their suspicions were confirmed by researchers from Palo Alto Networks who published a warning and an overview of the technical details on their website.

“Attackers infected two installers of Transmission version 2.90 with KeRanger on the morning of March 4. When we identified the issue, the infected DMG files were still available for downloading from the Transmission site,” they write.

KeRanger is so-called ransomware which effectively encrypts the victim’s computer. The attackers then promise to decrypt it if a ransom is paid, amounting to one Bitcoin in this case.

Ransom request (image credit Palo Alto Networks)

“The malware then begins encrypting certain types of document and data files on the system. After completing the encryption process, KeRanger demands that victims pay one bitcoin (about $400) to a specific address to retrieve their files,” the researchers explain.

“Additionally, KeRanger appears to still be under active development and it seems the malware is also attempting to encrypt Time Machine backup files to prevent victims from recovering their back-up data.”

Apple was also informed about the issue and has since revoked the abused certificate and updated its XProtect antivirus signature.

As Ars Technica points out, the “KeRanger” ransomware is notable as it’s the first Mac-targeted ransomware that’s been reported in the wild.

The Transmission team, meanwhile, has added a warning message to their site, alerting users to upgrade their clients right away.

“Everyone running 2.90 on OS X should immediately upgrade to 2.92, as they may have downloaded a malware-infected file. This new version will make sure that the ‘OSX.KeRanger.A’ ransomware is correctly removed from you computer,” the warning reads.

Transmission warning

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

Although not absolutely essential for making BitTorrent work these days, torrent trackers are always handy things to have. A bit like a policeman directing traffic, they ensure that BitTorrent clients can find each other quickly in order to share content.

Torrent indexes such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents (that don’t have a tracker) make the headlines regularly but it’s relatively rare for standalone BitTorrent trackers to make the news. They’re generally considered a bit of a techie phenomenon and to the casual torrent user they’re a silent benefit.

Nevertheless, trackers are interesting. For example, private torrent communities such as What.cd would have a big problem existing without one, since relying on magnet links would open the site’s torrents up to the public and destroy their privacy. In this scenario, trackers are great tools for putting What.cd’s users in touch with each other, relatively securely.

But while trackers are most closely associated with torrent sites, other organizations use them too. Indeed, after doing some digging around on “Internet of Things” search engine Shodan this week we were surprised to discover Apple running tracker services on around three dozen IP addresses located at its headquarters in Cupertino.

On the most common tracker port 6969, active trackers can be found on several IP addresses allocated to Apple including 17.17.17.102, 17.17.17.108, 17.17.17.30, 17.17.17.59, 17.17.17.8, 17.17.17.15, 17.17.17.133, 17.17.17.110, 17.17.17.138, 17.17.17.248, 17.17.17.56 and 17.17.17.248.

Trackers services can also be found running on (HTTP) port 80 on IP addresses including 17.17.17.220, 17.17.17.41, 17.17.17.44, 17.17.17.170, 17.17.17.58, 17.17.17.21, 17.17.17.104, 17.17.17.102, 17.17.17.133, 17.17.17.59, 17.17.17.108, 17.17.17.27, 17.17.17.5, 17.17.17.15, 17.17.17.24, 17.17.17.243, 17.17.17.68 and 17.17.17.41.

According to Shodan, IP address 17.17.17.102 reports trackers running on port 6969 and port 80.

TorrentFreak contacted Apple to learn more about the purpose of these trackers but at the time of publication we hadn’t received a response. However, we did manage to reach Shodan CEO John Matherly who told us that his company carries out several checks beyond a port being open to ensure its results are accurate.

“To determine whether a computer is running a BitTorrent tracker Shodan sends a connection request with a transaction ID of 0x34925,” Matherly told TF.

“If the host responds to the connection request with a valid BitTorrent tracker response (i.e. with an action, transaction id and connection id) AND the transaction ID matches what the Shodan crawler originally sent (0x34925) then it is considered a BitTorrent tracker.”

The Shodan CEO couldn’t shine any additional light on Apple’s need for BitTorrent trackers but he joined us in the theory that the company probably uses them for internal distribution, possibly like Twitter and Facebook do already.

In 2010, Twitter announced that BitTorrent made server deployment 75 times faster than before.

“Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds,” an engineer reported at the time.

Facebook also uses BitTorrent to quickly shift large quantities of data and back in 2010 the company raved over its benefits.

“BitTorrent is fantastic for this, it’s really great,” the company said. “It’s ‘superduper’ fast and it allows us to alleviate a lot of scaling concerns we’ve had in the past, where it took forever to get code to the webservers before you could even boot it up and run it.”

A TF source who prefers to remain anonymous says that after running the Apple IP addresses against an eight million torrent database, none of them produced a match, something which boosts the ‘internal use’ theory. That said, in an ideal world internal processes shouldn’t really be exposed to the public, so it remains unclear why Shodan is reporting public facing BitTorrent trackers at Cupertino.

Finally, it’s interesting to take the existence of these trackers and place that alongside Apple’s aggressive stance towards the millions of customers who would also like to use torrent software on Apple devices. On several occasions the company has removed torrent applications from its App Store yet the company seems happy to benefit from the technology itself.

If Apple responds to our request for comment, we’ll be sure to update this article.

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