TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Pirate Bay Typo Squatter Trying To Seize Site Trademark
- BREIN Tracks Down and Serves Pirate Bay Founder, On Film
- 5 Ways To Download Torrents Anonymously
| Pirate Bay Typo Squatter Trying To Seize Site Trademark Posted: 20 Aug 2010 04:03 AM PDT This Wednesday a security blog reported that several rogue sites are in operation which aim to pull in people who were aiming to reach The Pirate Bay, but accidentally entered the URL with typos. While this kind of activity is nothing new, there is a more interesting detail being overlooked. One of the companies behind the scheme is trying to register the Pirate Bay trademark in the United States.
Rogue file-sharing sites have been flourishing for years and keeping up with them all is an impossible task. What most of them have in common though is that generally users don’t get what they expected from their visit. In some cases they do get what they want but end up paying, often quite high prices too through shady small print or confusing terms and conditions. These days more often than not they get what they were looking for but also get something unexpected on top – such as some nasty malware. Since victims are visiting the file-sharing equivalent of a clip joint, in many cases they find themselves with no legal recourse, meaning these sites run and run. There are probably a dozen methods of pulling people into these sites, but the main technique is to utilize established file-sharing brands and themes. There are hundreds of scammy sites with ‘MP3 download’ in the title and countless others which play on the LimeWire, BitTorrent and eDonkey/eMule brands. Yesterday the Sunbelt Blog reported on a scam, actually several different scams, which in part target two very well known brands, eMule and The Pirate Bay. The method of drawing people in relies on them typing in The Pirate Bay’s domain name incorrectly. A small typo here or there takes the victim to a fake domain which results in them downloading a piece of malware. All pretty standard stuff for file-sharing scammers. However, while researching the companies and individuals behind the dozen or so domains, one particular name stood out. Several of the domains are registered to a company called Pioneer Enterprises and many have their true owners obscured by a privacy service. But a few, and indeed others not listed by Sunbelt, are registered to one Craig Pratka of Yaphank, New York. Pratka appears to be behind a company called BladeBook, LLC which is the registrant of dozens of other domains. Nothing particularly unusual about that except that BladeBook seem to be branching out into a new area – trademarks. June 30th 2009 was a pretty exciting day. Sweden’s Global Gaming Factory shocked the world by announcing that it would buy The Pirate Bay for $7.8 million in the hope that it could turn the site into a cash cow. This event didn’t go unnoticed by BladeBook, LLC. According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Pratka filed a U.S. federal trademark registration for PirateBay (Serial 77770964) on that same day, later going on to file registration for PiratesBay for good measure. While both of those applications have now expired with the statement “Abandoned” others are in the pipeline. On Thursday May 6th 2010, BladeBook filed trademark registrations for Pirate Bay (Serial 85032017) and Pirates Bay (Serial 85032022). The description given by BladeBook for ‘their’ business is as follows; Provision of telecommunications access and links to computer databases, computer networks and the Internet, namely, providing users online access via a website to third party websites featuring downloadable audio-visual media content in the nature of full-length, partial-length, and clips from motion pictures, television programming, sports events, videos, music videos, music, and interactive games. FIRST USE: 20020611. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20070111 Last year Sweden-based Englishman and alcohol entrepreneur Colin Scragg registered The Pirate Bay (Serial 77787908) so that he could put the site’s famous logo on bottles of rum. That registration is now listed as “opposition pending”. At the time of publication, Craig Pratka has not responded to our requests for comment. Article from: TorrentFreak. |
| BREIN Tracks Down and Serves Pirate Bay Founder, On Film Posted: 19 Aug 2010 01:25 PM PDT Last month the Amsterdam Court confirmed an earlier judgment and ordered The Pirate Bay to cease all of their activities in The Netherlands. Despite denials of current connections to the site, the founders face penalties of 50,000 euros per day for non-compliance. Today BREIN boss Tim Kuik physically tracked down Peter Sunde in Europe, explained the verdict and had their encounter filmed.
BREIN won the case and the founders were ordered to block Dutch users, a decision they chose to appeal. The trio denied current connections to the site but the Court rejected this defense as the defendants could not name the current owners or provide any documents proving that the site was sold to Seychelles-based company Reservella. Last month the earlier ruling was confirmed in a full trial at the Amsterdam Court, a hearing none of the founders attended. The Court ruled that Fredrik, Gottfrid and Peter will now have to pay penalties of 50,000 euros per day for non-compliance. However no action has yet been taken by the site to block Dutch users. Perhaps concerned that the founders aren’t aware of the Dutch ruling, today BREIN boss Tim Kuik embarked on a remarkable mission. As we reported earlier, the Green Party hosted a panel discussion titled "Art in the Digital Age" in Vienna, Austria, this week. One of the invited panel guests was Werner Müller, boss of the Austrian film and music industry trade association. Müller withdrew his participation after he discovered that Peter Sunde was going to be there. Tim Kuik, however, saw pinning down Sunde’s location as a golden opportunity. “Just explained new Dutch verdict to Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde in Vienna and handed him a copy of it: stop or pay 50K a day,” said Kuik tonight. In order to document the event, Kuik also had their meeting filmed and recorded. In a statement BREIN said that Sunde “was spotted on a terrace near the open air debate venue”. There he was approached by Kuik who explained the Amsterdam Court’s ruling and gave him a copy. "He is aware of the verdict now", says Kuik, "so the terms are running, he has to show up or pay up." Article from: TorrentFreak. |
| 5 Ways To Download Torrents Anonymously Posted: 19 Aug 2010 05:25 AM PDT With anti-piracy outfits and dubious law-firms policing BitTorrent swarms at an increasing rate, many Bittorrent users are looking for ways to hide their identities from the outside world. To accommodate this demand we'll give an overview of 5 widely used privacy services. With an increasing number of BitTorrent users seeking solutions to hide their identities from the outside world, privacy services have seen a spike in customers recently. Below we’ve listed some of the most-used services that allow BitTorrent users to hide their IP-addresses from the public. The services discussed in this post range from totally free to costing several dollars a month. The general rule is that free services are generally slower or have other restrictions, while paid ones can get you the same speeds as your regular connection would. VPN (paid / free)Hundreds and thousands of BitTorrent users have already discovered that a VPN is a good way to ensure privacy while using BitTorrent. For a few dollars a month VPNs route all your traffic through their servers, hiding your IP address from the public. Some VPNs also offer a free plan, but these are significantly slower and not really suited for more demanding BitTorrent users. Unlike the other services listed in this article, VPNs are not limited to just BitTorrent traffic, they will also conceal the source of all the other traffic on your connection too. Ipredator, Itshidden and StrongVPN are popular among BitTorrent users, but a Google search should find dozens more. It is recommended to ask beforehand if BitTorrent traffic is permitted on the service of your choice. BTGuard (paid)BTGuard is a proxy service that hides the IP-addresses of its users from the public. The service works on Windows, Mac, Linux and as the name already suggests, it is set up specifically with BitTorrent users in mind. Besides using the pre-configured client, users can also set up their own client to work with BTGuard. It works with all clients that support "Socks V5″ proxies including uTorrent and Vuze. In addition, BTGuard also includes encryption tunnel software for the real security purists. After these words of praise we’re obligated to disclose that BTGuard is operated by friends of TorrentFreak, but we think that should be interpreted as a recommendation. TorrentPrivacy (paid)Torrentprivacy is another proxy service for BitTorrent users, very similar to that of BTGuard. It offers a modified uTorrent client that has all the necessary settings pre-configured. The downside to this approach is that it is limited to users on Windows platforms. TorrentPrivacy is operated by the TorrentReactor.net team and has been in business for more than two years. Anomos (free)“Anomos is a pseudonymous, encrypted multi-peer-to-peer file distribution protocol. It is based on the peer/tracker concept of BitTorrent in combination with an onion routing anonymization layer, with the added benefit of end-to-end encryption,” is how the Anomos team describes its project. Anomos is one of the few free multi-platform solutions for BitTorrent users to hide their IP-addresses. The downside is that it’s not fully compatible with regular torrent files as Anomos uses its own atorrent format. Another drawback is that the download speeds are generally lower than regular BitTorrent transfers. On the uTorrent Idea Bank, more than 1,600 people have asked for the Anomos protocol to be built in to a future uTorrent build, making it the second most-popular suggestion overall. Seedbox (paid)A seedbox is BitTorrent jargon for a dedicated high-speed server, used exclusively for torrent transfers. With a seedbox users generally get very high download speeds while their IP-addresses are not shared with the public. Once a download is finished users can download the files to their PC through a fast http connection. FileShareFreak periodically reviews several good seedbox providers. — Feel free to drop us a comment if you think we left something out, or if you have experiences or recommendations you want to share. Article from: TorrentFreak. |
For as long as illicit file-sharing has been around there have been entrepreneurs targeting those out for a free lunch – or a free movie or song. Since many thousands of people new to the downloading game are aware that what they are doing could land them in a little hot water, these individuals are perfect targets for scammers.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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