TorrentFreak Email Update |
- U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’
- Record Label Teaches Music Fans BitTorrent
- Some File-Sharers Leave Trails To Their Front Door
| U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’ Posted: 16 Feb 2011 04:39 AM PST As part of “Operation Save Our Children” ICE's Cyber Crimes Center has again seized several domain names, but not without making a huge error. Last Friday, thousands of site owners were surprised by a rather worrying banner that was placed on their domain. “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution,” was the worrying message they read on their websites. As with previous seizures, ICE convinced a District Court judge to sign a seizure warrant, and then contacted the domain registries to point the domains in question to a server that hosts the warning message. However, somewhere in this process a mistake was made and as a result the domain of a large DNS service provider was seized. The domain in question is mooo.com, which belongs to the DNS provider FreeDNS. It is the most popular shared domain at afraid.org and as a result of the authorities’ actions a massive 84,000 subdomains were wrongfully seized as well. All sites were redirected to the banner below. This banner was visible on the 84,000 sitesThe FreeDNS owner was taken by surprise and quickly released the following statement on their website. “Freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse of its DNS service. We are working to get the issue sorted as quickly as possible.” Eventually, on Sunday the domain seizure was reverted and the subdomains slowly started to point to the old sites again instead of the accusatory banner. However, since the DNS entries have to propagate, it took another 3 days before the images disappeared completely. Most of the subdomains in question are personal sites and sites of small businesses. A search on Bing still shows how many innocent sites were claimed to promote child pornography. A rather damaging accusation, which scared and upset many of the site’s owners. One of the customers quickly went out to assure visitors that his site was not involved in any of the alleged crimes. “You can rest assured that I have not and would never be found to be trafficking in such distasteful and horrific content. A little sleuthing shows that the whole of the mooo.com TLD is impacted. At first, the legitimacy of the alerts seems to be questionable–after all, what reputable agency would display their warning in a fancily formatted image referenced by the underlying HTML? I wouldn’t expect to see that.” Even at the time of writing people can still replicate the effect by adding “74.81.170.110 mooo.com” to their hosts file as the authorities have not dropped the domain pointer yet. Although it is not clear where this massive error was made, and who’s responsible for it, the Department of Homeland security is conveniently sweeping it under the rug. In a press release that went out a few hours ago the authorities were clearly proud of themselves for taking down 10 domain names. However, DHS conveniently failed to mention that 84,000 websites were wrongfully taken down in the process, shaming thousands of people in the process. “Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet,” Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano commented. “DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization,” she added. A noble initiative, but one that went wrong, badly. The above failure again shows that the seizure process is a flawed one, as has been shown several times before in earlier copyright infringement sweeps. If the Government would only allow for due process to take place, this and other mistakes wouldn’t have been made. |
| Record Label Teaches Music Fans BitTorrent Posted: 15 Feb 2011 11:01 AM PST
At the same time the above labels intensify their crusade against BitTorrent, several smaller and independent labels are trying to find ways to benefit from the technology. Adamant Records is a good example of the latter. Instead of fearing technology, they are embracing BitTorrent and even explaining how it works to visitors to their site. Next to the ‘download on iTunes’ links to their albums, Adamant Records is prominently featuring a BitTorrent tutorial on their homepage. Why you might ask? Well, unlike the major labels Adamant Records seems to believe that they may eventually benefit from giving away music on BitTorrent. BitTorrent ExplainedThe video is related to an interesting announcement that came in a few minutes ago. One of Adamant Records’ top bands “Sick of Sarah” has partnered with BitTorrent Inc. and is now offering their new album “2205″ through an app in uTorrent and the Mainline client. "Releasing an album on BitTorrent is an incredible opportunity. We wanted to reach our fans on the Internet, and our fans use BitTorrent," says Jamie Holm, Sick of Sarah's bassist in a response to the partnership. "Imagine exposure to the same number of people as a Super Bowl ad. While album sales will remain a critical element of success, we also believe BitTorrent will help us drive new fans to live concerts and purchase our merchandise." Indeed, BitTorrent Inc’s uTorrent and BitTorrent mainline clients have more than 100 million monthly users combined. By releasing the album to such a large audience the band hopes that they will pick up many new fans, who will boost the band’s income in the long run. "Our industry is changing fast, and it's time for bands to experiment with new types of Internet distribution and discover the future of fan engagement. We're excited to work with BitTorrent to learn what works," Jamie Holm says. BitTorrent’s CEO Eric Klinker applauds the band for sharing their music with uTorrent and Mainline users, which is expected to benefit all the parties involved. “Sick of Sarah's progressive thinking and modern approach to making their music available to online audiences is inspiring. The band's efforts align with our vision of an open ecosystem. Rather than act as a middleman between creators and consumers, our engineers are building technologies to connect the two communities directly,” Klinker said. Sick of Sarah's album Sick 2205 is available in the App studio of uTorrent and BitTorrent mainline and can be downloaded for free. The BitTorrent App Studio was launched by BitTorrent last August and features content from selected content providers including Spotlight Artists such as Sick of Sarah. |
| Some File-Sharers Leave Trails To Their Front Door Posted: 15 Feb 2011 07:15 AM PST A team of researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) has just published their study of over 10 million usernames collected from Google profiles, eBay accounts and other sources. They discovered that around half of the usernames could be linked to another matching online profile, which could enable scammers to build up a more detailed profile of individuals they wish to target. “A scammer could use this information to build a profile of a person and then target them with convincing phishing messages—perhaps referring to specific purchases on another website,” writes TechnologyReview in response to the study. But while this research is certainly relevant to Internet users in general, it is also of great interest to those who may be sharing files online without the copyright holder’s permission. TorrentFreak learned last year, perhaps unsurprisingly, that anti-piracy companies are increasingly using profiling techniques to identify and track the habits of the more prolific file-sharers, in particular initial uploaders. However, while it’s unclear to what use this gathered data is being put, we can confirm 100% that users targeted in so-called Speculative Invoicing (we caught you sharing files, pay us money to go away) campaigns are being tracked through their general Internet use and comments they have made used as leverage against them. In several cases last year, Internet users caught up in ACS:Law’s pay-up-or-else sweep asked for advice on how to respond to the law firm using online forums. The usernames they used were not unique. In fact they corresponded perfectly with ones they used on other forums where they had been less careful about disguising who they were. In at least one case a user even discussed downloading the material he was accused of, albeit some months earlier. In another there was general talk about file-sharing, hardly proof of infringement, but it doesn’t help a case longer term. Another person, who contacted TorrentFreak with his plight, had previously emailed ACS:Law using the same email address. We Googled that and found a site where the person mentioned his website, which led to a WHOIS which, coupled with his forename posted freely on the forum, conveniently supplied his surname and address. From that information we were able to discover not that he had infringed, but had just come into some money – valuable information to a law firm looking to screw someone for hard cash. In another recent case which ended particularly badly for one confirmed file-sharer, armed with nothing but an email address and a forum post we were able to follow a trail which led into highly personal aspects of the individual’s life. Our deep suspicions, without compromising this person’s privacy further, is that this same trail was cynically exploited by copyright holders to extract a very sizeable settlement. Today, while writing this post, we spent just an hour on a private torrent tracker researching the site’s top 20 uploaders. In 13 cases we were able to find the users on other sites, including YouTube, Last.fm, eBay and any number of non-filesharing related forums. In 4 cases we were able to quickly identify real names. Given more time the exposure would almost certainly prove greater. As the INRIA researchers note, people using unique and easily identifiable usernames are more vulnerable to cross-site profiling. Others with common usernames are far more difficult to track down and in our quick tests we have to agree. Try Googling your regular usernames and email addresses…. Food for thought. |
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