TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
- Ministry of Sound Silenced By Huge DDoS Attack
- ACS:Law Boss: I Feel Defeated And Could Go Bankrupt
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent Posted: 04 Oct 2010 04:03 AM PDT The top 10 most downloaded movies on BitTorrent, 'Get Him To The Greek' tops the chart this week, followed by 'Machete'. 'Predators' completes the top three.
The data for our weekly download chart is collected by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ministry of Sound Silenced By Huge DDoS Attack Posted: 03 Oct 2010 11:45 PM PDT Today, lawyers Gallant Macmillan will attend the High Court in London in an attempt to persuade a senior judge to order the handover of hundreds more identities of people accused of file-sharing. To mark this occasion, Operation Payback decided to hit the London law firm but after they tried to nullify the planned DDoS attack, Anonymous hit their client instead. Many hours later, Ministry of Sound is still out of business online.
The continuation of the hearing between Ministry of Sound Recordings Ltd and ISP Plusnet Plc will go ahead at London’s High Court. Gallant Macmillan hope that the judge, Chief Master Winegarten, will order Plusnet to hand over the identities of hundreds of alleged filesharers so that Ministry of Sound can prise a cash settlement out of them, ACS:Law style. To give Gallant Macmillan something to think about, on Saturday the leaders of Operation Payback decided on a new target. At 2pm EST (7pm GMT) Sunday October 3rd (yesterday), the website of Gallant Macmillan was destined to become the next target of a DDoS attack, coordinated from the Operation Payback homepage. But Gallant Macmillan’s web admin had other ideas. Fairly quickly the GMLegal.co.uk site began returning the ‘Invalid Hostname’ error. “This suggests that an administrator has manually pulled the website off the server, although the domain is still pointing to the same server,” a leader of Operation Payback told TorrentFreak. Nevertheless, Gallant Macmillan (and their mail service housed on the same server) remained the target but then, shortly before the attack was due to start, the law firm took an unexpected action. “An hour before the attack, GMLegal.co.uk changed their DNS records to point to 127.0.0.1, effectively surrendering,” we were informed. But a new target had already been chosen, one that didn’t have any time to prepare. Minutes after 7pm GMT, the website of Ministry of Sound, which ordered the action against alleged file-sharers, was taken offline by a huge DDoS attack. The payment site of the company was also targeted, along with its operations in other countries. This is the first time that a site that actually makes money from selling music has been targeted in Operation Payback and the attack will have a direct financial consequence for Ministry of Sound which turns over around £80 million worldwide. At the time of writing, some 12 hours after the attack began, much of MoS’s online operations remain down. If Operation Payback wanted to give MoS something to think about in court today, they will have achieved their aim, especially if the judge doesn’t give them an easy ride. Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ACS:Law Boss: I Feel Defeated And Could Go Bankrupt Posted: 03 Oct 2010 12:25 PM PDT After disgruntled letter recipients mailed off a barrage of complaints to the Solicitors Regulatory Authority against ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley, he told his advisor that not only did he "feel defeated" but that in his long-term interests it might be better if he "shut up shop". Doing so, he explained, would bankrupt him. Some people, particularly those of a resilient nature operating in the cut and thrust of big business, have a skill for letting nothing get to them. Or at least they give that impression. Up until recently ACS:Law owner Andrew Crossley was one of those guys. Despite mounting criticism and the immense pressure of several hundred complaints about his company’s conduct delivered to the Solicitor’s Regulatory Authority, in public Crossley has remained strong. Defending his position at every available opportunity through media interviews and self-penned pieces, one might be forgiven for thinking that nothing could shake this man from his ‘turn piracy into profit’ crusade. But behind closed doors, things were very different. “I am worried about the latest developments. Apparently there are presently over 500 complaints against me thanks to the internet campaign and Which,” Crossley wrote to his advisor just over a month ago. “Each complaint is essentially the same and they are borne out of a determination by some to stop legitimate steps being taken to curtail illegal file sharing. However, I do not know how I can avoid being found guilty of something, with 500 complaints to choose from,” he continued. The concern that Crossley shows for the complaints that have been made to the SRA will be very empowering for those who took the time to write to the solicitors’ watchdog. Some individuals had begun to air frustration that their efforts had been in vain, but even in advance of a Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal decision which is still some time off, it is clear those efforts have seriously got under Crossley’s skin. But the problems for ACS:Law go deeper than the SRA investigation. While turning alleged file-sharing infringements into settlement agreements, and in turn transforming those into hard cash may be a fairly new business model, it suffers from the same problems as any commercial operation. Despite Crossley pulling in huge amounts of money and leading the high-life, company emails reveal that he paid the bulk of his employees very little. Nevertheless, the costs of operating the business had been spiralling in recent months causing it to experience cash-flow and other financial problems. One long-running payment dispute involved UK ISP Entanet who had been supplying ACS with customer identities and charging for the service. In March this year, a series of emails between Entanet and ACS Law’s company-hopping Terence Tsang revealed that the law firm still had not paid an invoice from July 2009, some 8 months earlier, and several thousand pounds remained outstanding. After promising to pay but failing to do so, Entanet said they would no longer provide ACS with subscriber details and threatened to take the law firm to court for the debt. The company also had problems paying an O2 bill of more than £13,000. Even ACS:Law business partner Lee Bowden from Media CAT became irate in August after his emails demanding money owed went unanswered. “You seem to have ignored my previous e-mail, I am not happy and want some revenue in account,” he wrote to Crossley. “Everyone is getting [th]eir bit and I am owed £17k ffs.” Of course, financial frictions are a daily event for many companies. But for a firm already under pressure, with its owner seriously considering the future viability of the business, there were added pressures. As Crossley made clear to his advisor in August, ACS:Law’s entire future hangs on the success, or failure, of his Speculative Invoicing model. “If I stop this work my business will fold and my clients will be big losers, but if I carry on I fear that it will be worse for me in the long run,” he wrote to his advisor, prophetically. If Crossley was of the opinion that things could be worse in the “long run” even before the email leak, one can only imagine what he is thinking now. Even back then, just over a month ago, he was clearly disillusioned and on the verge of giving in. “Presently I feel defeated by it and feel I should shut up shop, which will cause me to go bankrupt for certain,” he explained. The prospect of ACS:Law stopping their activities will be music to the ears of many thousands of people, but what are the chances of that? Looking at the business chain, fairly high. Even if the various rights holders stick with the company and Crossley doesn’t decide to pull the plug voluntarily, it may prove difficult to service them. Apart from the fact that the ACS internal emails show significant amounts of friction between the company and their IP harvesting partners, before this fiasco only TalkTalk and Virgin Media refused to cooperate when ACS:Law went to court to request the handover of customer data. After the epic data leak of BSkyB, BT and Plusnet user data, all of these ISPs have said they will cease cooperation with the company. Furthermore, at this stage it seems unthinkable that any ISP would risk being seen to hand over data to ACS:Law. Furthermore, it would also seem reasonable to presume that Chief Master Winegarten will probably feel a little uncomfortable authorizing any more court orders until ACS can prove they have their house in order, and that could take a very long time indeed. Coupled with the cash-flow problems touched on above, that day might never come. So, with no ISP subscriber details handed over, there will be no names to connect to possible infringements. With no names and addresses to put on letters, there can be no cash settlements. With no cash settlements, there can be no more turning piracy into profit. There could hardly be a more bleak outlook. But of course, ACS still has all the IP addresses and identities from earlier court orders, maybe they’re hopeful that these could still yield some cash to bridge this period of uncertainty? That seems unlikely. Not even Crossley is confident. While bemoaning public perception that a complaint had already been upheld against him by his recent referral to the SDT, Crossley concluded: “Meanwhile, thanks to Which and their lawyer I doubt that the latest campaigns which we were out to run will have any meaningful recovery..” It is easy to blame (or credit, depending on your perspective) Which? for cutting off ACS:Law’s revenue stream (arguably BeingThreatened.com have made a greater contribution in this respect) but since the email leak and the absolute destruction of the company’s reputation, it would take a special kind of letter recipient who, despite the mountain of information available via a simple Google search, still chose to keep the company alive by paying them money. But, as the saying goes, a fool and his money are soon parted. Article from: TorrentFreak. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This week there are three newcomers in the list. Get Him To The Greek is the most downloaded movie on BitTorrent for the second week in a row.
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