TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Leading Chinese File-Sharing Site Disables Illicit Music and Movie Downloads
- Top 10 Most Downloaded Movies on BitTorrent
- EZTV Introduces BitTorrent RSS Standard, With Magnets
- BitTorrent Sites Hacked By Secret Government Unit? Not So Fast..
| Leading Chinese File-Sharing Site Disables Illicit Music and Movie Downloads Posted: 24 Jan 2011 03:28 AM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
After providing access to a huge range of music, movies and TV shows since 2003, VeryCD pulled the plug on many of its links to illicit entertainment downloads. “7 years of hard work and accumulation, that will now shut off, the end is the end. No one wanted this, but we had expected this moment would suddenly come,” said founder Huang Yimeng on the site’s official blog this weekend. “Now all we can do is face the reality with courage. We must never give up – 2011 is our new starting point. Work! Hard!” After avoiding a crackdown against many similar sites in 2008, the pressure on VeryCD in 2011 was clearly too much. As reported earlier this month, China’s attempts at reducing copyright infringement have increasingly targeted the digital domain and while Youtube-like sites have taken up much of the spotlight, it was only a matter of time before linking sites like VeryCD felt similar heat. Huang Yimeng confirmed that the mass deletions were prompted by urgent copyright infringement fears and that the site was forced to act sooner than it would have liked. “Although we have been preparing for this event, the required adjustment was very urgent. This lead us to adjust rather quickly to delete the content of copyright-related disputes,” Huang Yimeng explained. The urgency spoken of is almost certainly related to the fact that earlier this month the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate and the Ministry of Public Security released a document which detailed penalties for online copyright infringement. If someone uploads a movie, TV show, music, software or even image to the Internet without the consent of the copyright holder, penalties apply if certain conditions are met. These include if more than 500 pieces of the work are spread to others, if total online downloads hit 50,000 or if a site where the material is located has a signup membership of more than 1,000. Penalties are harsh – between 3 and 7 years in jail. VeryCD is also keen to obtain an official license to operate and this move towards authorized content should help with that. Users of VeryCD are understandably disappointed at the disappearance of so much content. But while one user complains that due to the mass deletions he will no longer be able to “get an understanding of the world” from his small city which has few cinemas, another, three comments down, posts a reply – containing a BitTorrent magnet link to the same content. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Downloaded Movies on BitTorrent Posted: 24 Jan 2011 01:02 AM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
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.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| EZTV Introduces BitTorrent RSS Standard, With Magnets Posted: 23 Jan 2011 01:44 PM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! .
About a year ago TorrentFreak caught up with RSS inventor Dave Winer, who noticed that the RSS feeds on most torrent sites were a ‘mess’. Nearly every site uses a different format, and this is problematic for application developers who want to create tools for BitTorrent users. “It's pretty much a mess,” Dave Winer told TorrentFreak while outlining some suggestions for a BitTorrent RSS namespace in a blog post. “Let's clean it up," Winer said, encouraging torrent site admins to join the discussion. This call for action was soon picked up by various torrent site admins, and yesterday the EZTV team launched a BitTorrent RSS standard on their sister site ezRSS. “The current RSS spec was rather limited when it came to torrent information and some of the methods other RSS feeds were doing in regards to torrents was just messy, by creating a bit torrent RSS namespace, we can now give more specific data to applications and users in a structured format,” EZTV’s Novaking told TorrentFreak. “Dave Winer gave some good advice, and we have taken a lot of it on board. We still plan to expand on the spec, so far we just released version 0.1 xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/ – xmlns.ezrss.it/0.1/dtd/ and version 0.2 is already in the pipeline,” he added. Although the technicalities may not be of interest to most users, everyone who uses RSS feeds on BitTorrent sites will eventually benefit from standardization. It will allow applications to include more options and features, including magnet links and more advanced download ‘rules’ based on the number of seeds and peers. EZTV’s Novaking further told us that this new standard has been developed with input from other key figures in the BitTorrent community, to guarantee a broad adoption among torrent sites. “I have talked to quite a few other torrent admins and we are currently coding up an easy to use RSS builder which will generate the RSS feeds using this new namespace, this will allow easy implementation for anyone who wishes to use it,” he said. The first version of the new spec is now live on ezRSS and users and fellow BitTorrent developers are encouraged to send in their feedback for the next version of the spec. If all goes well the new standard should lead to a wide range of new and exciting RSS tools for torrent users, to make downloading even more convenient and seamless than it already is. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| BitTorrent Sites Hacked By Secret Government Unit? Not So Fast.. Posted: 23 Jan 2011 06:45 AM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! . The Computer Crime Department of Bulgaria’s organized crime unit made quite a lot of noise last year in taking down several sites connected to online file-sharing and warez piracy. However, despite their sabre-rattling the country’s biggest BitTorrent sites, ArenaBG and Zamunda, have remained up. Threats by pirate-hunter-in-chief Yavor Kolev, who in July 2010 vowed to take them down, came to nothing. Then in the early hours of Saturday morning, all hell broke loose. At 1am Zamunda went down, quickly followed by ArenaBG. A posting on the latter’s separate forum spelled doom. “Once again the virtual society of free sharing of information is under threat,” began the announcement on ArenaBG on the back of the chaotic situation at both sites. “The initiator of this work is a secret group called ‘Council for the Protection of Intellectual Property’. Formally, this organization seems like an inter-ministerial body, but its meetings are invited and attended mostly by representatives of the so-called ‘Rightholders’,” noted the lengthy posting. It concluded by confirming the site’s defiant intentions of bouncing back against any further attacks on its domain name or servers. Little wonder then that this dramatic version of events was quickly reported by several news outlets in Bulgaria, some with the apparent confirmation that the government had hacked or DDoS’d the sites in question and taken them offline. However, TorrentFreak has discovered that there may be a more simple explanation for the downtime at both sites. According to a source close to Zamunda, late Friday night the site suffered what is being described as “a technical malfunction of a crucial piece of equipment”. The extended downtime that followed was due to the failure happening during the night. “The problem has been taken care of and measures have been taken in order to improve [future] response to emergency situations of any sort that can lead to temporary server unavailability,” our source added. So while this clears up the situation at Zamunda, how does one explain the problems at ArenaBG? As boring and simple as it sounds, it seems that when Zamunda went down Bulgarians needed an immediate replacement site so thousands of them flooded to the next logical choice – ArenaBG. The site simply couldn’t cope and went down under the load. While there are reports today that Yavor Kolev of the Computer Crime Department has denied any involvement in the downtime, he also took the opportunity to warn the sites that since they continue to “break the law” they can expect attention in the future. The panic in Bulgaria this weekend certainly shows that the country’s BitTorrent community exists on a knife edge. Only time will tell if their position becomes more or less secure in 2011 but if Kolev is to be believed, it might be the latter. The signs are, however, that neither site intends to go quietly. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For the millions of users of VeryCD, quite possibly the leading file-sharing site in China, yesterday was renamed “Black Sunday”.
This week there are four newcomers in the list. The Green Hornet is the most downloaded movie of the week.
For those who are unfamiliar with the term, RSS is an acronym for 'Really Simple Syndication'. It's a really convenient mechanism which allows you to receive regular automated updates from your favorite websites, including torrent sites.| You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment