After one and a half decades of mainstream file-sharing, millions of people now have little trouble finding and consuming unauthorized content online.

For many the process is no more difficult than browsing the web but due to its technical nature the majority still find it bewildering. Then along came Popcorn Time, software that turned viewing movies into child’s play for anyone with a PC, tablet or phone.

But the idea behind Popcorn Time isn’t new. Advanced users of the popular Kodi software (previously known as XBMC) have been enjoying a super-charged Popcorn Time rival for many years. However, that largely requires the mastering of an often confusing third-party addon system. Inevitably, of course, that became streamlined too.

Just as Popcorn Time works out of the box, custom installations of Kodi do too. These installers make the previously complex setup process a breeze and in doing so introduce a whole new audience of novices to piracy, just like Popcorn Time has.

Of course, this simplicity hasn’t gone unnoticed by anti-piracy outfits. Legal action against Popcorn Time was common in 2014 and continued in 2015. No surprise then that those peddling ‘pirate’ Kodi variants (which have nothing to do with the team behind the project) are now getting more attention.

The problem is availability and ease of use. Sold pre-configured in Android set-top box form on both eBay and Amazon, the devices are essentially a one-stop shop for not only pirate movies and TV shows, but also a streaming hub for live sports and PPV. Anyone can have one of these devices delivered next day and learn how to use it in under an hour. Oh, and they run Popcorn Time too. And Showbox.

As a result, piracy has never been easier and anti-piracy groups are scrambling to stem the tide. Just last week a seller of ‘pirate’ Android boxes was raided by police in the UK and just days ago Amazon overreacted by banning the entirely legal Kodi software itself, presumably after a copyright holder complaint.

Other attacks have been more targeted. Last year the Federation Against Copyright Theft filed a complaint against a popular live sports plugin for Kodi known as Sports Devil. But according to FACT, this was just the beginning of their crackdown on these piracy platforms.

“Those engaged in piracy have always been quick to take advantage of technological advances to create new methods to profit from delivering stolen content to a wider audience. The proliferation of IPTV and set-top boxes which can stream content is no exception,” the anti-piracy group told TF.

“We are working with our members and partners in law enforcement on addressing these threats and significant measures are being taken by all parties, including online market places, to address the availability of these devices, as well as the apps and add ons that facilitate illegal streams, and bring those responsible to account.”

The ‘custom Kodi’ epidemic hasn’t gone unnoticed in the Netherlands either. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN is currently engaged in legal action against Filmspeler.nl, a seller of “fully loaded” (a euphemism for “piracy configured”) Android boxes.

In fact, BREIN is so serious about ending the problem that the case is being sent to the European Court of Justice so that an opinion can be gained on whether streaming from illegal sources represents a breach of EU law. If BREIN wins it won’t end the problem, but it will draw a line in the sand in terms of how such products can be advertised and sold.

“We will always look at any system that is aimed at providing access to copyrighted content without consent of the right holders and by doing so is causing damage to the earning potential of right holders and licensed platforms,” BREIN chief Tim Kuik told TorrentFreak.

Finally, since these devices are increasingly being targeted at the non-tech savvy, is it possible that buyers are naive to the point that they don’t appreciate their dubious legal standing? Kuik thinks not.

“We see that people using such systems tend to be aware they are getting access to unauthorized content even if they don’t know how it works technically,” the BREIN chief concludes.

The big question now is what comes next, and what will be the industry’s response? That will become clear in the months and years to come but rest assured, the easier piracy becomes, the more vigorous the response will be.

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

Generally speaking, BitTorrent is a highly robust file-sharing protocol that’s not easily disrupted. However, in recent weeks there have been systematic efforts to prevent large groups of people from sharing popular pirated TV-shows and movies.

The sabotaging technique tries to make it impossible for downloaders to connect to other people by overwhelming BitTorrent swarms with IPv6 peers.

Because of its focus on IPv6, not all users are affected, but those who are sometimes see their download speeds grind to a halt. As a result it can take days to download a file, if at all.

In short the process works as follows. The attacker joins a popular torrent swarm with hundreds, if not thousands of IPv6 addresses. These fake peers request data from real downloaders, quickly filling up their request queues.

The fake peers never exchange any data but keep the client busy until they are banned, as is shown in the screenshot below.

The attack has been confirmed to affect the popular client uTorrent. After a few minutes uTorrent does ban the malicious peers, but this makes little difference as the attackers use so many different IP-addresses.

Because all the fake peers have filled up the connection slots, real peers can no longer connect. This means that hardly any real data is transferred.

“Got unchoke from µTorrent 3.4.3 (12.345.678.9:9999), can’t request immediately because request queue is full”

TF was tipped off by the operator of one of the largest torrent trackers, who informed us that this type of attack is rampant. Many people are complaining about slow download speeds or torrents that are stuck.

“This new method of peer flooding makes a lot of people think there are issues with torrents. From an anti-piracy point of view it is achieving the purposed effect,” the tracker operator, who prefers to remain anonymous, said.

We were able to replicate the effect, which indeed makes downloading nearly impossible. After testing all of the larger BitTorrent clients it appears that only uTorrent and BitTorrent Mainline are vulnerable to the attack. However, together these two clients are used by the majority of all BitTorrent users.

We informed BitTorrent Inc, who develop the two clients, about the vulnerability. The company informed us that they are currently looking into the issue and may comment later.

Without an immediate fix, the tracker operator is advising affected users to switch to a different client for the time being, or disable IPv6 in Windows (not recommended for Windows 7 and up), if that’s an option.

“People experiencing download slowness – torrents stuck at 0% for more than 10 minutes, in a case where there are seeds available, should immediately switch to a different client or disable IPv6 in Windows,” the tracker operator says.

It is unclear who is behind the attacks, but considering the fact that it targets nearly all new TV and movie torrents, it could very well be a novel anti-piracy strategy. In any case, it’s definitely one of the most effective attempts to disrupt BitTorrent downloads in recent years.

Update: The IPv6 addresses which are used appear to be fictional. They haven’t been allocated yet and are non-routable.

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

Late last year the UK Government legalized copying for private use, a practice which many citizens already believed to be legal.

However, until last October, anyone who transferred music from a purchased CD to an MP3 player was committing an offense.

The change was “in the best interest” of consumers, the Government reasoned, but several music industry organizations disagreed.

In November the Musicians’ Union (MU), the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors (BASCA) and UK Music applied for a judicial review of the new legislation.

While the groups are not against private copying exceptions, they disagreed with the Government’s conclusion that the change would cause no financial harm to the music industry.

Instead of keeping copies free, they suggested that a tax should be applied to blank media including blank CDs, hard drives, memory sticks and other blank media. This money would then be shared among rightsholders, a mechanism already operating in other European countries.

Today the High Court largely agreed with the music industry groups. The Government’s conclusion that copyright holders will not suffer any significant harm was based on inadequate evidence, Mr Justice Green ruled.

“In conclusion, the decision to introduce section 28B [private copying] in the absence of a compensation mechanism is unlawful,” the Judge writes.

The Judge didn’t agree with all claims from the music groups. For example, he rejected the allegation that the Government had unlawfully predetermined the outcome of the private copying consultation.

Nonetheless, the application for a judicial review succeeded meaning that the private copying exceptions are now deemed unlawful. As a result, the Government will likely have to amend the legislation, which took roughly half a decade to implement.

The UK music groups are happy with the outcome and are eager to discuss possible changes with lawmakers.

“The High Court agreed with us that Government acted unlawfully. It is vitally important that fairness for songwriters, composers and performers is written into the law,” UK Music CEO Jo Dipple commented on the ruling.

“Changes to copyright law that affect such a vital part of the creative economy, which supports one in twelve jobs, must only be introduced if there is a robust evidential basis for doing so,” Dipple added.

The High Court scheduled a new hearing next month to decide what action should be taken in response to the judgment, including whether the private copying exceptions should be scrapped from law.

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

After becoming a smash hit with viewers of mainstream movies for more than a year, earlier this month a new version of Popcorn Time thrust onto the scene.

Titled Porn Time, this hot variant allows users to access a wide range of adult content pulled from Pornleech, the largest public adult oriented BitTorrent tracker.

With the ability to cast directly to big screens using Chromecast, Airplay or DLNA, Porn Time was always destined for success, but new figures reveal that the software has exceeded all expectations.

According to the people behind the project, in the week following its release the software was downloaded an impressive 450,000 times.

“We’re pretty shocked and find it a little hard to believe and amusing in a way. But Porn Time, the Popcorn Time for Porn, became an Internet phenomenon just one week after it went live!” the team informs TF.

But it didn’t stop there. Figures complete up until this Wednesday reveal that the software now has 598,580 active users, an impressive feat for software with zero marketing budget and no app store to rely upon. However, this growth wasn’t achieved entirely smoothly.

“We weren’t prepared for such an eruption of people coming to get Porn Time and our servers crashed. Twice,” the team reveal.

“Pornleech also crashed!! They just couldn’t handle the heat. It took them a few days to get their act back together and got back online just recently. In the meantime we went and fetched some more sources of content, The Pirate Bay for example, which made our users happier and more addicted.”

With 58.6% of installs the Windows edition of Porn Time proved most exciting, with Mac users holding their own with 32.71% of the total. That left Linux users to bring up the rear with 8.69%.

Keen to keep pressing forward, a few hours ago the Porn Time team debuted a brand new Android edition. They expect that it too will become a roaring success.

“Anyone can understand why an app like this on your personal mobile device is the best thing that has happened to humanity since bread came sliced,” the team told TF.

“Creating the first Android app was pretty easy because of Popcorn Time’s awesome Android app. We just took their app, made some cosmetic changes, and voila! Now you can see content that puts a smile on your face.”

And if Apple users are feeling left out, that sensation shouldn’t last for long. The team inform us that an iOS edition is just around the corner.

“I think we will release it in three weeks. We are in an advanced development stage, but the truth is that this is the first time we are programming in Objective C and it’s taking us some time,” the team concludes.

More information on Porn Time for Android can be found here.

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

The Pirate Bay has had its fair share of legal problems and technical difficulties over the years.

Just last month a Swedish court ordered the seizure of site’s main .se domain name. This case is currently on appeal but in the meantime TPB is rotating several new domains.

A few days ago, however, reports started rolling in that the notorious torrent site is no longer accessible to some, across all domains.

Instead of the usual homepage visitors see an error message in their browser, suggesting that the DNS lookup failed.

Luckily enough, the problems are only affecting URLs with a www prefix. For some reason, the corresponding DNS entries have been removed rendering all www links inaccessible.

While it’s quite common for websites not to use the www prefix (we don’t), there’s usually a redirect setup so visitors are directed to the correct URL.

Since TPB doesn’t have a redirect set up, many people are inaccurately assuming that the site is suffering downtime.

For now it remains a mystery why the DNS entries were updated. TF spoke with a moderator of the site, who told us that he and his team were not informed about the changes.

The dropped www prefix is not the only issue The Pirate Bay has been facing recently. Over the past weeks several parts of the site broke temporarily, including user registrations and torrent uploads.

To inform users about these and other technical difficulties, the TPB crew has a status page showing which services are up and running. This page is maintained by the moderators and separately hosted at the Suprbay forum.

As shown below, all crucial features are fully operational at the time of writing. That is, if users have dropped the www prefix from their bookmarks.

Update: strangely enough www.thepiratebay.se started resolving again, without a redirect. The other domains are still www-less.

TPB status

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