With millions of active users Steam is not just a game distribution platform, but also a social network and a communication tool.

Many people use Steam’s instant messaging tool for chats with friends. About games of course, but also about lots of other stuff.

Interestingly, it appears that Steam doesn’t want its users to talk about certain topics. When the popular torrent site KickassTorrents went offline earlier this week, one Steam user noticed that his messages on the topic were being censored.

“There is no warning or blocked message notification. The messages simply disappeared,” we were told.

After running some tests, which have been replicated by TF, it’s clear that messages mentioning the Kickass.to domain name are not coming through. It’s not just the domain that’s censored, but the entire message.

Below is an example of the vanishing text where the user sent the following three lines.

1. The next line may be missing
2. A line mentioning Kickass.to
3. Was there a line 2

The person on the other end of the conversation only sees line 1 and 3, without a warning or notification that the second line was not sent.

It’s unclear why Steam is censoring these conversations. TorrentFreak contacted Valve to find out more about the disappearing chats, but at the time of publication we have yet to receive a response.

It would be easy to conclude that the copyright infringing links on Kickass.to are the reason, but then it’s strange that The Pirate Bay and all other torrent sites are not affected.

Interestingly, however, kickass.to seems to be the only one that’s affected right now. Other domains including Kickass.so and Torrentz.eu are flagged by Steam as potentially malicious, and users get a warning if they attempt to open them. These domains do show up in private chats though.

Without a comment from Valve the true reason for the awkward censorship measures remains unknown. It is clear though, that Steam is keeping a close eye on what people talk about.

That by itself is already quite concerning.

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

More than five years ago the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) ended its legal action against local ISP Eircom when the ISP agreed to implement a new anti-piracy policy.

The agreement sees Sony, Universal and Warner tracking Eircom subscribers online and the ISP forwarding infringement notices to customers uploading music without permission. Eircom promises to disconnect subscribers who are caught sharing three times.

The entire point of this scheme and others like it is to inform Internet users that a “graduated response” is in operation. Whenever a notice is received users should be in no doubt they’re edging closer to being punished and ultimately cut off.

For its part the music industry is clear. ‘Strikes’ regimes which don’t promise to disconnect or otherwise punish users are much less effective than those that have these measures. After all, who wants to be cut off by their ISP?

But if that’s indeed the case, why then is Eircom keeping the prospect of disconnections out of its communications with alleged pirates?

TorrentFreak has obtained one of the latest letters being sent out to Eircom subscribers. Received by a customer already on a warning, it begins normally enough.

“Eircom has a long association with Irish music and we believe that artists deserve to be paid for the work they create. Most music files are protected by copyright and while it may be acceptable for them to be stored on a computer for personal use, it is unlawful to share those files without the copyright owner’s permission,” the letter reads.

The warning goes on to note that sharing copyrighted music is a breach of Eircom’s terms and conditions and as such it’s the subscriber’s responsibility to ensure the connection is not used to breach copyright. Standard stuff so far.

At this point one might expect Eircom to be getting into the details of its “three strikes” scheme implemented on IRMA’s behalf, informing the subscriber how after the third time sharing copyrighted material he or she will have their broadband connection terminated. Instead, however, the ISP makes no mention of it.

“Please accept this letter as an advisory notice, and should no further activity as described above occur then no further action will be taken. The details of this notification will be retained for 12 months from the dates of this letter and will be deleted thereafter unless we receive an additional notification in that period,” the notice adds.

And that’s pretty much it. No mention of a graduated response, no mention that subscribers will disconnected from the Internet. It’s a very strange approach considering the substantial sums of money spent by IRMA and Eircom to reach their “three strikes” agreement.

So why the kid gloves?

Since disconnecting customers is not exactly helpful to profitability, Eircom’s agreement with IRMA requires that the ISP isn’t put at a commercial disadvantage. To that end, IRMA has been locked in a five-year legal battle to force rival ISP UPC to also implement “three strikes”.

Pending the outcome of that case, Eircom is currently the only ISP in Ireland promising to disconnect pirates. Playing that fact down in its letters to customers would certainly make commercial sense and stop those looking to jump ship.

However, the other elephant in the room is that last year Eircom admitted it hadn’t disconnected anyone in four years of the “strikes” scheme. Add that to “weak” letters being sent out to customers and some might presume that disconnections are already off the table, at least unofficially.

Still, there’s always the educational aspect to “graduated response” campaigns – you’ve been caught once so why not go straight now?

As required by the IRMA deal, Eircom informs “strike” recipients where they can go to obtain legal music downloads – or at least that’s the idea. Sadly, in its infringement notices Eircom points them to eircom.net/legalmusic, a page that hasn’t existed for some time.

A secondary educational effort in the letter sees the ISP encourage customers to completely remove file-sharing software and infringing files from their computers.

“IRMA provides a program called ‘Digital File Check’ which can be downloaded from their website. It checks for and removes any infringing files and applications commonly used to share music illegally,” the letter notes.

However, those following the link (www.ifpi.org/content/section_resources/digital-file-check.html) find it less than helpful. Links to the software on IFPI’s site send users round in a never-ending loop and the official domain DigitalFileCheck.com, for those who can be bothered to hunt it down, is completely dead.

The situation is baffling. Why spend years pushing for this system yet execute it so poorly once it’s in place? Why then force other ISPs to do the same? It’s debatable whether these schemes have any effect at all, but if this is the model that’s no surprise.

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

After three years of relative inaction the criminal case against Megaupload and seven of its employees heated up this week.

Just a few days ago the U.S. authorities arrested Andrus Nomm, one of the indicted Megaupload defendants.

The 36-year-old programmer had been living in the Netherlands but came to the States to take a plea deal.

The Department of Justice just announced that Nomm pleaded guilty to criminal copyright infringement, and was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

According to the DoJ statement Nomm acknowledged that he “was aware that copyright-infringing content was stored on the [Megaupload] websites, including copyright protected motion pictures and television programs, some of which contained the ‘FBI Anti-Piracy’ warning.”

“Nomm also admitted that he personally downloaded copyright-infringing files from the Mega websites. Nomm continued to participate in the Mega Conspiracy,” the statement continues.

The authorities are happy with their first vistory in this case and are determined to bring the other defendants to the U.S. as well.

“This outcome is the result of years of hard work by our office and our partners from the Criminal Division and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” U.S. Attorney Dana Boente said.

“The Mega Conspiracy engaged in massive criminal infringement of copyrighted works on the Internet, and we are confident that this case will be a sign to those who would abuse technology for illegal profit,” he added.

Meanwhile, Megaupload’s founder Kim Dotcom slammed the U.S. legal system in a comment, but says that he understands Nomm’s decision.

“The US Justice system: An innocent coder pleads guilty after 3 years of DOJ abuse, with no end in sight, in order to move on with his life,” Dotcom tweeted. “I have nothing but compassion and understanding for Andrus Nomm and I hope he will soon be reunited with his son.”

Megaupload lawyer Ira Rothken told TF that the U.S. authorities might have taken advantage of Nomm. As an Estonian citizen living in a foreign country he was vulnerable, and running out of funds.

“The DOJ apparently used Andrus Nomm’s weak financial condition and inability to fight back to manufacture a hollywood style publicity stunt in the form of a scripted guilty plea in court,” Rothken says.

“The facts mentioned in court, like a lack of cloud filtering of copyrighted works, are civil secondary copyright issues not criminal issues,” he adds.

According to Rothken the “publicity stunt” reveals how weak the DoJ’s case is.

“The DOJ apparently convinced Andrus Nomm to say the conclusory phrase that Kim Dotcom ‘did not care about protecting copyrights’ and such point shows off the weakness in the DOJ’s case as Megaupload, amongst many other ways of caring, had a robust copyright notice and takedown system which gave direct delete access to major content owners and from which millions of links were removed.”

Nomm’s sentencing for criminal copyright infringement is raising eyebrows among several experts.

In the indictment there was only one example of possible copyright infringement, and that referred to watching a copy of a pirated TV-show. For now it remains unclear what other evidence the authorities have.

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

Exactly two weeks after the long-awaited comeback, The Pirate Bay appears to be in trouble again.

It’s currently not clear what’s causing the problems. There might be a hardware issue, routing problem or a software glitch, issues that have occurred many times in the site’s history.

However, after the prolonged downtime earlier this year many people are now fearing the worst.

The site’s domain name is working properly and the nameservers appear to be setup correctly too, so those variables can be ruled out.

The Pirate Bay currently displays a CloudFlare error message suggesting that TPB’s servers are unresponsive.

TorrentFreak reached out to The Pirate Bay’s admin and we will update this article if we hear back.

While the main site is down, many of the Pirate Bay’s clones and copies that became popular during TPB’s recent seven week outage are still accessible.

Update: Pirate Bay’s .onion address still works (http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/). This means that the site is accessible over the Tor network, including the Pirate Browser.

Update: TPB is back after roughly 12 hours. The admin informed us that there was a hosting issue, this has been resolved now.

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

Targeting the domain names of “pirate” sites and services has become one of the main priorities for copyright holders.

Previously, City of London Police managed to convince several registrars to suspend sites that allegedly infringe copyright and earlier this week Swedish authorities commented on their efforts to seize two of Pirate Bay’s domains.

Since it’s not always easy to convince registrars or registries that these sites are acting against the law, rightsholders are also exploring another route, pointing out administrative issues for example. This is how EZTV lost its .IT domain.

Private BitTorrent tracker TorrentShack also ran into administrative problems this week, and on Monday the site’s .EU domain became unreachable.

“As you can see there is a problem with the Whois/Domain at the moment, the problem is not with our setup and is being reported by the domain hosts as fully live (not suspended),” TorrentShack staff said.

“If necessary we have backup solutions in place and we are not going anywhere while the problem is being tracked down,” they added.

While the site’s registrar may not report a suspension, the EURid registry certainly does, as shown below.

This issue is reminiscent of the trouble a popular Popcorn Time fork faced a few months ago. They also lost control of their .EU domain, which is now listed as withdrawn.

To find out more about the reason for these suspensions TorrentFreak contacted the EURid registry. We were informed that a “third-party” alerted them to the fact that both domain names were registered with inaccurate details.

“We have initiated our verification procedure based upon complaints from third parties and we have suspended/withdrawn the respective domain names based on inaccurate holder’s address details,” an EURid spokesperson told us.

“As you know, the .eu terms and conditions, as well as the registration policy, require the domain holder to keep his/her contact information as shown in WHOIS complete and accurate at all times. Based on our verification, we can confirm that for both .eu domain names that was not the case.”

The above means that TorrentShack probably won’t return on their .eu domain name and they have switched to theshack.us.to for now. This switch is not without problems, as many torrents still use the old .eu domain as an announce URL.

There seems to be an easy fix for this issue, as several users report that the torrents will become active again by manually pointing the .eu domain name to the tracker IP-addresses in the hosts file.

The identity of the mysterious “third-party” behind the complaints is likely to remain a mystery. However, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they’re most likely from a copyright holder group.

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