TorrentFreak Email Update |
- U.S. Government Targets Large BitTorrent Sites And Trackers
- 70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable
- Chaos Computer Club Revive Famous BitTorrent Tracker
| U.S. Government Targets Large BitTorrent Sites And Trackers Posted: 01 Mar 2011 02:00 AM PST In its “Out-of-Cycle Review of Notorious Markets”, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has listed more than 30 Internet and offline physical ‘markets’ which it says exemplify “key challenges” in the fight against piracy and counterfeiting. "Piracy and counterfeiting undermine the innovation and creativity that is vital to our global competitiveness. These notorious markets not only hurt American workers and businesses, but are threats to entrepreneurs and industries around the world," said United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk. "The review we are announcing today shines a light on examples of many offending markets, and highlights an opportunity to work together with our trading partners to curb illicit trade and expand legitimate commerce in creative and innovative industries." Although a number of real-life traditional markets are listed, with physical locations stretching from Ecuador and Paraguay to Indonesia and China, it is those in the virtual world taking pride of place at the start of the report. In addition to various AllofMP3 pay-to-download clones, the embattled Chinese search engine Baidu, online auction Taobao and Russian social networking site Vkontakte, it is perhaps inevitable that the report concentrated heavily on the BitTorrent scene. The report splits the torrent sites into two categories – BitTorrent indexers and BitTorrent trackers. Heading the indexing list, as it does on so many occasions, is The Pirate Bay. It is followed in second place by Canada’s isoHunt. While the USTR points out that the former has been targeted in a criminal prosecution and the latter by civil litigation, the remaining sites on the indexing list have been the subject of neither. In third place appears BTjunkie, noted by the USTR to be “among the largest and most popular aggregrators of public and non-public [private] torrents.” The final two places are collected by Kickasstorrents – “notable for its commercial look and feel” – and Torrentz – “a major aggregator of torrents from other BitTorrent sites.” The separate BitTorrent tracker list is headed up by Russian-based Rutracker. Formerly known as Torrents.ru, the site’s domain name was seized in earlier copyright-related action but operates today with millions of users. Second on the tracker list is the green devil of Ukraine – the semi-private Demonoid. The site has been the subject of threats and legal action in the past, but nothing that has gone to conclusion. Demonoid has had its share of downtime in the past but has proven largely stable and strong during the last year. Despite carrying no searchable indexes and hosting zero torrents, the PublicBT and OpenBitTorrent trackers also make an appearance. The final position in the BitTorrent tracker list is taken by Zamunda, itself the target of a criminal prosecution in its home country of Bulgaria. At this point there are no concrete indications what inclusion on this list will mean for the sites involved, other than the threat by the USTR that they “may merit further investigation for possible Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) infringements.” The USTR does say specifically that it has an “action plan” with the Ukranian Government to act against some of the notable AllofMP3 clones, but there is no mention of dealing with Demonoid in any way. Potentially the sites listed above could face having their domain names seized but it is unlikely that that the approach will have much long-term effect on their operations or the wider torrent ecosystem, particularly since they are all preparing or are indeed already prepared for such an eventuality. |
| 70% of the Public Finds Piracy Socially Acceptable Posted: 28 Feb 2011 01:12 PM PST During the last decade the entertainment industries have tried numerous strategies to thwart Internet piracy. One of the most common, especially with the music industry, was to sue some file-sharers into submission thereby creating a climate of fear designed to deter others. Needless to say, that didn’t work particularly well. The movie industry has largely concentrated their legal efforts largely on taking sites down but have also been active in trying to educate Internet users through various schemes that piracy is ‘wrong’ and causes real damage. On the whole, that hasn’t worked either, and a new study just released appears to back up the assertion. The study, published by the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit, questioned participants on morals and ethics, and included discussion on which laws they believe are socially acceptable to break. The Danish study, which ultimately concluded that moral standards are just as high as they were 10 years ago, covered issues such as tax evasion, insurance fraud, the morality gap between men and women and, to the interest of TorrentFreak readers, piracy. In the piracy section respondents were asked to rate, on a scale from 1 to 10, whether they thought unauthorized downloading for personal use is a socially acceptable act. The researchers found that 7 out of 10 of those questioned felt, to a greater or lesser degree, that it is socially acceptable. 15-20% of the total group believed that piracy is totally acceptable. A minority of just over 30% of the respondents voted at the very bottom of the response scale, an indication that they feel piracy is completely unacceptable. Interestingly, despite the never-ending anti-piracy campaigns of the last decade, the attitudes of the public don’t seem to have changed much. When questioned for a 1997 study on whether it was acceptable to use pirate software, the same proportion – 3 out of 10 – said the activity was unacceptable. However, in the new 2010 study, there is an interesting common moral denominator among respondents. When questioned on whether it is acceptable to download something and then sell it to a friend for profit, 3 out of 4 said that would be completely unacceptable. The results of the study show that it is nearly impossible for copyright holders and anti-piracy groups to change the attitudes of the public in their favor. If they want piracy to decrease, their best bet is probably to focus on lowering the incentives for people to pirate, there seems to be more opportunities in that area. The study can be found here (.pdf) in Danish. |
| Chaos Computer Club Revive Famous BitTorrent Tracker Posted: 28 Feb 2011 06:51 AM PST
A few months ago, however, the tracker suddenly went offline for no apparent reason. The official blog went silent and calls from the public to the once popular tracker remained unanswered. Even today the old denis.stalker.h3q.com is still unresponsive, but the people behind the project did revive it under a new name a few days ago. The denis.stalker tracker has moved to a new home at tracker.ccc.de. One of the reasons for the change in domain name is the recent rounds of seizures where several file-sharing related domains were pulled offline. Although the standalone tracker is not the first target that would come to mind, a non-US controlled domain is simply the safest option nowadays. The tracker is now hosted on the main domain of the influential hacker organization Chaos Computer Club (CCC), which is one of the best spots to be in. The German based CCC has more than 4000 members and hosts Europe’s largest hacker congress December each year. One of the main motives of CCC is to strive for “freedom of information,” with fits well with the operation of one of the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. The new tracker address responds on port 6969, just like the old one. This means that people who know how to edit their hosts file can update it to allow torrents with the old domain-name to work. http://denis.stalker.h3q.com:6969/announce => http://tracker.ccc.de/announce To help the adoption of the new tracker address The Pirate Bay is adding it to all new torrents that are uploaded to the site. At the time of writing, the new domain has been in use for just a few days, but it is already tracking 58,787 torrents and over 500,000 peers. So, although the denis.stalker.h3q.com name is not coming back, the service it provided has been reinstated. That, plus an army of hackers to defend it in case outside forces try to silence it. Not a bad change at all. tracker.ccc.de stats |
With more than 10 million peers and 1,614,356 active torrents, Denis.Stalker ended up in 
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