TorrentFreak Email Update

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MPAA Takes A Dozen Torrent Sites Offline Posted: 27 Jan 2011 01:32 PM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! . The MPAA has been very concerned with the widespread and unauthorized availability of motion picture movies on the Internet, specifically via torrent sites. Last November it reported some of the largest torrent sites to the US Government, including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and BTjunkie, calling them piracy havens. In a follow up to the many accusations, the MPAA has now managed to shutter 12 torrent sites at once, a headline designed to send shockwaves through the BitTorrent community. The MPAA has teamed up with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, who have perfected the art of pulling sites offline. In the last two years alone the organization has (temporarily) disabled more than 1000 torrent sites in The Netherlands, and they are now helping the MPAA towards doing the same in the US. Twelve torrent sites were wiped from the Internet this week, but there is a catch to this ‘unprecedented’ action. As often with BREIN-led takedowns, nobody noticed a thing. If a torrent site of any significance goes offline for an hour or two our email inbox is usually alive with reports from readers. Today, however, we received none. That doesn’t mean of course that the news isn’t worth reporting on. BREIN issued a press-release earlier today in which they appear very satisfied with what they’ve accomplished, and they assure the public that this isn’t the last time we will hear about such a torrent site massacre. At the same time BREIN head Tim Kuik also explained why they target small players and why they keep the site names a secret. “New sites are popping up, but we take these down faster and faster so they can’t gain an audience,” Kuik says. “Our goal is to limit the availability of illegal sites so people rather use legal platforms. BREIN doesn’t publish any names because some sites relocate and start over elsewhere.” The MPAA, perhaps wisely, didn’t release a comment at all. That leaves us with a final question for our readers. Do you happen to know of a torrent site that has gone missing over the past several days, or do you have more information on the affected sites? Feel free to get in touch with us.

Wikileaks ISP Anonymizes All Customer Traffic To Beat Spying Posted: 27 Jan 2011 05:21 AM PST Check out TorrentFreak's new News Bits feed! . In 2009, Sweden introduced the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED). The legislation gave rights holders the authority to request the personal details of alleged copyright infringers. This prompted Jon Karlung, CEO of ISP Bahnhof, to announce that he would take measures to protect the privacy of his customers. Shortly after Bahnhof ceased logging customer activities and with no logging there was no data to store or hand over. Now, in the face of Sweden’s looming implementation of the European Data Retention Directive which will force them to store data, Bahnhof – who are also Wikileaks’ Swedish host – will go a step further to protect the anonymity and privacy of their customers. Soon, every Bahnhof customer will be given a free anonymizing service by default. “In our case, we plan to let our traffic go through a VPN service, ” Bahnhof’s Jon Karlung told SR. Bahnhof Servers Since the service will encrypt user traffic, not even Bahnhof will know what their customers are doing online. If the ISP doesn’t know about their activities, then there’s not much to log. Nothing to log means there’s nothing useful to hand over to authorities and anti-piracy companies. “Technically, this is a stealth section, we will store all data up to this point of invisibility,” adds Karlung, referring to the first-hop connection the customer makes with the company’s servers when going online. “What happens after that is not our responsibility and is outside Bahnhof. So the only thing we are going to store is very little information, which in practice will be irrelevant.” Of course, there will be commercial implications for other Internet service providers in Sweden if they fail to address privacy concerns as Bahnhof have done. To this end, other ISPs are believed to have plans in the pipeline to follow suit, but these are yet to be formally announced. Bahnhof customers who don’t want to remain anonymous and would like everything they do online to be stored for a minimum of 6 months, can opt-in to be spied on – for around $8.00 per month extra.

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