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“I Leaked Black Ops” – Confessions of an Xbox 360 Pirate

Posted: 30 Nov 2010 01:52 PM PST

Last month, with the gaming community waiting eagerly for the release of Black Ops, the latest instalment in the Call of Duty series, news broke that that developer Treyarch was feverishly trying to contain a potential leak of the game. While partially successful, Black Ops still leaked a week before its due date. This is the story of how.

In mid-October it was reported that Xbox 360 retail versions of the much-awaited Black Ops game had been stolen from an Alabama pressing plant and that Treyarch's community manager, Josh Olin, had been desperately trying to contain the problem. Here’s the inside story of that leak, how it was contained and how the pirates won in the end.

Apparently someone who had acquired a copy of Black Ops had offered one of the copies to an Internet user known as ‘Ungodly Leaker’, someone who was also allegedly involved in the earlier leak of Halo:Reach. In order to raise funds to buy the game (the seller wanted around $450 for it), Ungodly Leaker started gathering donations on an Internet forum, which for the purposes of this article shall remain nameless.

Funds gathered, and it was time to get hold of the game. The seller wasn’t within driving distance of the small group involved with the purchase, so someone who they barely knew but had gained some trust with was given half of the donated funds as an advance and given the task of physically collecting the disc.

But there was a problem. Someone who appeared to be Treyarch’s Josh Olin was watching the whole deal going down. Sources with access to privileged information told TorrentFreak that after IP address checks, it was confirmed to be really him.

Olin went on to warn a handful of members of the forum about not leaking the game – somehow he had managed to find out their personal telephone numbers. It was agreed with Olin that the copy of the game would be collected by Treyarch and taken back into safe care.

Although Treyarch were successful this time, other sources for Black Ops were on the loose.

“A week or so later I start to get some real good leads, some of my usual contacts/sources were notifying me that they would be getting the game within the next few days and would sell it to me for a decent price,” a key figure in the eventual leak of the Xbox 360 version of Black Ops told TorrentFreak.

“Obviously I kept pretty quiet about it, it’s always the best thing to do with something like this. You never know what could happen.”

By October 30th, T.P as he is known, had two separate people who said they were willing to supply the game. But the 30th was a Saturday which meant that the game would delivered by 2nd November at the earliest – not nearly quick enough for someone used to the efficiency of digital transfers.

Unexpectedly, however, another source appeared – one that had not only got the game but had already and conveniently ripped it to an ISO. Confirmed as legitimate, the deal was on. For $50.

The screenshot that was used to prove the ISO was genuine

TP Black Ops

True to his word the supplier uploaded the game to a file-hoster (which must remain nameless) in around 70 parts, some of which had unique passwords. The next job was to get Black Ops spread to a worldwide audience and for this T.P received assistance from a member of the Scene. Through highly encrypted connections, uploads were made to a very large private BitTorrent tracker and various Usenet servers.

“When the ISO was being uploaded/spread around I was receiving a lot of abuse and death threats from forums, on IRC and on MSN,” T.P told TorrentFreak. “Makes me sick how people expect something for nothing, and when there is a slight hiccup they think they have the right to complain about it.”

In the end the release got out there but, in true pirate style, T.P’s leak was quickly pirated by someone else wanting to take the credit for his work. As can be seen on this article on Releaselog, the release of the version Call of Duty Black Ops READNFO XBOX360-FW was ‘nuked’ (disallowed) by the warez Scene for being from a “stolen source”.

“This release is just a P2P repacked rip (Release: Call.of.Duty.Black.Ops.XBOX360-T.P),” explained Rlslog adding, “..available 1 hours before on some trackers.”

Of course, being first is everything when releasing and T.P is very happy with the results here.

“Being the first to leak a big title is great motivation as many will remember you for months/years in the future and recognise your work,” he told us.

“I enjoy seeing my work all over the internet, people saying thanks etc. It’s nice to see people who appreciate the time spent to release something.”

Indeed, a huge number of people will be saying “thanks” for T.P’s efforts. As of last week, the Xbox 360 version of Black Ops had been downloaded more than half a million times and will certainly end up in TorrentFreak’s Top 10 most downloaded games of 2010.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

BitTorrent Based DNS To Counter US Domain Seizures

Posted: 30 Nov 2010 07:19 AM PST

The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.

dot-p2p In a direct response to the domain seizures by US authorities during the last few days, a group of established enthusiasts have started working on a DNS system that can’t be touched by any governmental institution.

Ironically, considering the seizure of the Torrent-Finder meta-search engine domain, the new DNS system will be partly powered by BitTorrent.

In recent months, global anti-piracy efforts have increasingly focused on seizing domains of allegedly infringing sites. In the United States the proposed COICA bill is explicitly aimed at increasing the government’s censorship powers, but seizing a domain name is already quite easy, as illustrated by ICE and Department of Justice actions last weekend and earlier this year.

For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains, not least because several top level domains are managed by US-based corporations such as VeriSign, who work closely together with the US Department of Commerce. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.

To limit the power governments have over domain names, a group of enthusiasts has started working on a revolutionary system that can not be influenced by a government institution, or taken down by pulling the plug on a central server. Instead, it is distributed by the people, with help from a BitTorrent-based application that people install on their computer.

According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”

“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”

The Dot-P2P project was literally started a few days ago, but already the developers are making great progress. It is expected that a beta version of the client can be released relatively shortly, a team member assured TorrentFreak.

The project has been embraced by many familiar names in the P2P-community. Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is among them, and the people from EZTV have been promoting it as well.

“For me it’s mostly to scare back. To show that if they try anything, we have weapons of making it harder for them to abuse it. If they then back down, we win,” Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.

Although the initiators of the project are still debating on various technical issues on how the system should function, it seems that the administrative part has been thought out. The .p2p domain registration will be handled by OpenNIC, an alternative community based DNS network. OpenNIC also maintains the .geek, .free, .null and several other top level domains.

On the other hand, there are also voices that are for distributed domain registration, which would keep the system entirely decentralized.

The domain registrations will be totally free, but registrants will have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension first, to prevent scammers from taking over a brand.

The new P2P-based DNS system will require users to run an application on their own computer before they can access the domains, but there are also plans to create a separate root-server (like OpenNIC) as a complimentary service. It’s worth noting that the DNS changes will only affect the new .p2p domains, it will not interfere with access to any other domains.

It will be interesting to see in what direction this project goes and how widely it will be adopted. There are already talks of getting Internet Service Providers to accept the .p2p extension as well, but even if this doesn’t happen the system can always be accessed through the BitTorrent-powered application and supporting DNS servers.

If anything, this shows that no matter what legislation or legal actions are taken, technology stays always one step ahead. The more aggressive law enforcement gets, the more creative and motivated adopters of the Open Internet will respond.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

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