TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Piracy is Theft? Ridiculous. Lost Sales? They Don’t Exist, Says Minecraft Creator
- Portuguese Government Creates Honeypot To Combat Piracy
- Anti-Piracy Outfit Suffers Huge DDoS Attack, Blames Usenet Users
- BitMate: A BitTorrent Client for Poor Bandwidth People
- Swebits BitTorrent Tracker Shuts Down Following Uploader’s Arrest
| Piracy is Theft? Ridiculous. Lost Sales? They Don’t Exist, Says Minecraft Creator Posted: 03 Mar 2011 01:40 AM PST
But while virtually all other game developers would be complaining about a near 70% of their market being eaten away by parasites who could care less about the gaming industry or the fate of those who work so hard for their entertainment, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson sees the situation rather more optimistically. Speaking during the closing session yesterday at the Independent Games Summit, Notch dismissed the notion that piracy is the same as stealing, or ‘looting’ as incoming MPAA chief Chris Dodd framed it this week. "Piracy is not theft," he said to those gathered in San Francisco. "If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world." With this kind of reasoning one could be forgiven for thinking that Notch has pirate sympathies but since he’s a self-confessed member of the Pirate Party, that stance comes as no surprise. "There is no such thing as a 'lost sale'," he added with a philosophy so Pirate-aligned it could be happily transcribed directly into any of their press releases. "Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?" Notch was expected to talk about piracy for 5 minutes at GDC but in the event only managed about 3 minutes, describing the experience as “the scariest thing in a long time.” But while he may have only utilized 60% of his available time, he appears to have packed in value and left people wanting more, which coincidentally is his game developers philosophy too. “If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week,” he told those in attendance. While anti-piracy zealots would insist that Minecraft has a 70% piracy or “lost sale” rate, Notch steadfastly sees his cup as rather more full than the raw percentages of his sales data may suggest, particularly by those viewing them from the perspective of an outdated business model. Indeed, despite this ‘pro-piracy’ stance, Minecraft’s position continues to improve. Back in September last year the game had 658,429 registered players, that’s an increase of 4,222,328 in less than 5 months. Currently 1,469,513 (30.1%) people have handed over money – in September that was 155,521 (23.62%) so its clear things are headed in the right direction. In the 24 hour period we examined in 2010, 4,910 people had bought Minecraft. Yesterday 10,381 did so. "Piracy will win in the long run. It has to," said Notch last year. "The alternative is too scary." If making truckloads of money is scary to Notch, he must be terrified right now. |
| Portuguese Government Creates Honeypot To Combat Piracy Posted: 02 Mar 2011 01:11 PM PST
People have alleged that some of the pay-up-or-else lawsuits against BitTorrent users came in part from torrents that were uploaded or seeded by the copyright holders themselves, but this hasn’t been proven either. This does not mean that honeypots are a myth. Indeed, in Portugal their existence is now confirmed, as a previously held back agreement between the Portuguese Phonographic Association (AFP) and the General Inspection of Cultural Activities (IGAC) reveals. This agreement is of special interest, since the latter organization falls under the Ministry of Culture. The protocol, which was announced a few weeks ago, was initially framed as an attempt to combat piracy under which AFP would provide ‘anti-piracy’ training to IGAC inspection officers. However, the fact that the actual text of the agreement was never publicized led the Portuguese Pirate Party to believe that something more was going on. And they were right. After filing a complaint with the authorities, the protocol was finally released by IGAC, as they are required to do by law. The Pirate Party believes that it was kept a secret for a reason, and after their analysis of the contents this suspicion was strengthened. Among other things, the agreement promotes a honeypot scheme where the music industry will grant the Government organization the right to upload tracks to file-sharing networks. These ‘traps’ will then be used to collect the IP-addresses of Portuguese file-sharers. The file-sharers who are caught by this honeypot scheme can expect a notification from their Internet provider, which may eventually lead to a disconnection due to a breach of the terms of service. The sad part about this, is that the evidence that the authorities gather is not very solid. In the agreement it’s stated that IGAC will rely on screenshots to prove which unauthorized material people are sharing. A rather simplistic and easy to forge method of evidence collection, The Pirate Party commented in their analysis. To prove their point, the Pirates offer a simple PHP script that can generate forged evidence on the fly. Towards the end of the agreement, it is revealed that the main purpose of the collaboration is to influence public opinion through the media. “The IGAC and the AFP agreed that the results obtained under this Protocol shall be disseminated to the media, particularly on the enforcement actions taken, the number and type of complaints, the number of notifications sent to ISP’s and other important aspects to achieve the objectives of this Protocol,” it reads. According to the Pirate Party the Ministry of Culture’s IGAC is acting undemocratically and possibly illegally too, while putting the interests of a few music labels before the rights of individual citizens. That stings. |
| Anti-Piracy Outfit Suffers Huge DDoS Attack, Blames Usenet Users Posted: 02 Mar 2011 05:05 AM PST When it’s your job to go around disrupting various communities on the Internet, it’s perhaps inevitable that, rightly or wrongly, you’ll become somewhat of a hate figure among some. Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, with chief Tim Kuik at the controls, is understandably unpopular within files-sharing circles. That position can have its consequences. Since late Monday evening BREIN’s website has been offline due to a major DDoS attack. Word is that some people aren’t happy with the recent activities of the Hollywood-backed group and have taken the distribution of justice into their own hands. While that might be a logical assumption there is currently no evidence to prove that is the case. That said, retaliation and revenge is often the motive for DDoS attacks. But if we’re looking for likely culprits on that basis, the potential list of instigators – considering the number of sites BREIN has taken down – would be huge. Nevertheless, accusatory fingers are already being pointed by BREIN. According to Tim Kuik the DDoS is a revenge attack following his company’s involvement in the takedown of the FTD Usenet community recently. “Supporters of FTD are probably behind the attack,” Kuik said. “We think that because the timing of the closing of FTD and the beginning of the attack exactly coincide,” he added. BREIN has been logging the IP addresses of the attackers and they apparently originate from The Netherlands. However, Arnoud Engelfriet, the lawyer who defended FTD in their case against BREIN, said that FTD were not in favor of the assault. “FTD deplores the DDoS attack as this isn’t the way to fight BREIN,” Engelfriet told TorrentFreak. “Executing DDoS attacks only strengthens the image that filesharing or downloading is a criminal activity, which does not help the cause.” While it’s possible that the demise of their community prompted a minority of FTD fans to take the law into their own hands, they’re not the only ones crossing BREIN from their Christmas card list. In January, BREIN managed to aggravate a whole bunch of warez Scene members when they seized the servers of the Swan topsite. Hate levels increased again in February when BREIN took down around a dozen Usenet sites. Add this to hundreds of smaller sites taken down last year and it starts getting to the point where it’s easier to make a list of supporters than enemies. This is not the first time that BREIN has suffered an attack on its web presence and then publicly linked it to a site it had previously targeted. In 2009, the founders of The Pirate Bay threatened to sue BREIN in Sweden after Tim Kuik accused them of carrying out a DDoS attack against his company’s site. |
| BitMate: A BitTorrent Client for Poor Bandwidth People Posted: 01 Mar 2011 02:31 PM PST A few days ago a new BitTorrent client surfaced under the promising name BitMate. The client is developed by a group of researchers from several well respected universities who have collaborated to improve the lives of BitTorrent aficionados in developing countries. The aim of BitMate is to drastically improve the download speeds of peers on low-bandwidth connection (5 to 20 KB/sec), to make BitTorrent more effective in places where people might need it the most. If we believe the claims of the researchers, they have succeeded in making a difference. TorrentFreak contacted Dr.Umar Saif, Associate Professor and leader of the initiative, to learn more about the new BitTorrent client. “We have spent close to 2 years experimenting with various tweaks in BitTorrent, using both real-world and synthetic swarms. BitMate is our first public release and is an ongoing project,” Saif said. During the latest tests the researchers found that compared to traditional clients, the download speeds on low bandwith connections can receive up to a 70% boost with BitMate, while upload contributions may improve by up to 1000%. “In our target conditions, Bitmate can almost double the download performance. At the same time, it performs at least as well as the traditional BitTorrent clients for high-bandwidth peers,” Saif noted. The beauty of it all, is that other peers are not negatively affected by these improvements. “BitMate enhances the performance of low-bandwidth nodes without cheating, circumventing the fairness policy of BitTorrent or adversely affecting the performance of other peers,” Saif told TorrentFreak. Among other things, BitMate can establish this advantage by prioritizing connections to other slow peers, by minimizing cross-ISP traffic and by avoiding redundant downloads. Combined with several other optimizations, the Vuze-based BitMate client is able to speed up downloads on slow connections. “Instead of wasting optimistic unchokes on high bandwidth peers, a BitMate client optimistically unchokes those peers that have a similar low-bandwidth. As a result, a BitMate client invests its scarce upload bandwidth on peers that are most likely to reciprocate.” “At the same time, BiTMate leaves the tit-for-tat reciprocal unchoke policy untouched to uphold the fairness of BitTorrent. This leads to both increased performance and fairness since low-bandwidth clients can quickly form mutually beneficial peer-to-peer connections,” Saif said. A win-win situation for all BitTorrent users, generously funded by the U.S. State Department. It’s almost too good to be true. BitMate’s latest version was released to the public three days ago and can be downloaded for free. The source code of BitMate is available at GitHub. Although the project is aimed at developing countries, there are plenty of people in other parts of the world that are on a slow connection, and might benefit from BitMate. BitMate’s poor peer in-crowd |
| Swebits BitTorrent Tracker Shuts Down Following Uploader’s Arrest Posted: 01 Mar 2011 10:34 AM PST
But yesterday, instead of being welcomed by the usual list of freshly uploaded content, visitors to Swebits found an unexpected and ominous message posted on the site’s homepage. “As we all know everything has a beginning and an end. This is the end of Swebits. During the last day there has been a lot of speculation, some with hope and some with less hope,” Swebits staff informed the site’s users. The notice went on to explain that the site had suffered a major DDoS attack and hardware failure last weekend, problems that are too time consuming and costly to fix. In addition, the site had a lack of donations recently, which according to the staff is a signal that the users don’t want the site to survive. “It’s been a pleasure to be a part of Swebits and being able to influence Sweden’s best tracker. We know that it will be hard to fill the void that Swebits will leave after closing, but it isn’t impossible to replace it. Take care, whatever happens in the future,” they add. However, this official message doesn’t take away all the speculation among users. Indeed, there appears to be an additional motive ignored by the announcements. Today, the Swedish authorities and local anti-piracy outfit Antipiratbyran revealed that someone close to the site was arrested last week. The 25-year old man, who allegedly was a major uploader to Swebits, had his house raided and was later arrested by the police. The man reportedly uploaded more than 1000 films to the site during a two week period last fall, and the authorities say he confessed his involvement during interrogations. The man is portrayed by the authorities as a central figure in the community and they link the closure of the site to his arrest. The number of films the man allegedly shared in just two weeks appears to be unrealistically high, but the prosecution seem confident in that claim. “This person is suspected of having made the original uploads and then sharing out the works via torrent files,” prosecutor Henrik Rasmusson commented. “Previously, we have focused us on the ‘scene, but now we have directed our focus to individual BitTorrent users,” said Henrik Ponten of Antipiratbyran in a comment. Interestingly enough the arrested man was ‘outed’ by the scene in the past, which might have tipped off the anti-piracy outfit. This is not the first time that Swebits has shut down. In 2008 the site’s users were also led to believe that the site had ceased operating, but at the time it was a stunt to promote the revamped design that launched hours later. This time, however, all signs suggest that Swebits wont be returning anytime soon, not in its current form at least. What role the arrest played in the shutdown is impossible to say without an official confirmation, but we have to assume that it caused concerns among the site’s staff members. Swebits message, as it appeared on the site. |
A quick look at the stats for the still-in-beta PC game 
Among file-sharers the term ‘honeypots’ is used to describe sites and services that are specifically set up to lure people into downloading copyrighted files. The label is often applied to suspicious looking sites, but proof of the existence of live honeypots is never provided. 
Founded in 2004, 
| 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