TorrentFreak Email Update |
- What.CD Founder Quits World’s Largest Music Torrent Site
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent
- Pirate Bay User Database Compromised and Exploited, Again
| What.CD Founder Quits World’s Largest Music Torrent Site Posted: 21 Mar 2011 03:53 AM PDT
In the three years that followed, What.cd grew beyond all expectations, outgrowing OiNK and establishing itself as the greatest music-sharing torrent site the world has ever known. With Christmas 2010 just around the corner, What.cd reached a somewhat spectacular milestone – the uploading of the site’s one millionth torrent. While this achievement is the product of the site’s hard-working members, these masses still need to be directed through leadership and a well-designed and run site. At What.cd these essential qualities have been provided from day one by site co-founder and coder extraordinaire, WhatMan. But to the huge disappointment of all who know him, WhatMan’s reign is now over. “I’ve always been willing to give all of my free time to this site, but as of several months ago, free time has become a luxury of the past. The less time I spend here, the less qualified I am to decide the future of the site and lead it in that direction,” WhatMan explains. “In these past few months, these duties have been impeccably overtaken by the current management, and I feel entirely comfortable leaving the site in their more than capable hands. It is thus, with great regret, that I have chosen to resign from my long-standing post as sysop of this site.” WhatMan, who has always conducted himself with grace, went on to give credit to all those staff, past and present, who have helped to make What.cd what it is today. And, like all great leaders, he acknowledged the work of the masses, who contributed hugely to the site’s ecosystem by ripping, uploading and simple downloading. “I’d love to write more, but this has been hard enough already. If nothing else, I guess, I’d like to be remembered as the badass who coded Ocelot,” WhatMan added. While the existence of What.cd is a memorable achievement in itself, the creation of the Ocelot tracker software utilized by the site is a milestone which will live on for many years to come. Indeed, Ocelot is one of the most efficient pieces of software of its type available today and the badass who created it will long be remembered, that’s guaranteed. What.cd remains in safe hands and will continue on seamlessly. Like all good site operators, WhatMan has clearly ensured that everything is running smoothly before announcing his departure. “It’s been a hell of a ride, What,” he concludes. “I know you’ll do fine without me.” | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies on BitTorrent Posted: 21 Mar 2011 02:14 AM PDT
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.
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| Pirate Bay User Database Compromised and Exploited, Again Posted: 20 Mar 2011 02:01 PM PDT
The Pirate Bay team informed TorrentFreak that they were doing all they could to patch the vulnerability, and later said that the site was fully secure again. Two month later, however, it became apparent that The Pirate Bay backend had been exploited, this time by spammers. At the time a large number of The Pirate Bay users received an email, allegedly from the site's operators, inviting them to join the private BitTorrent tracker DemUnoid. The emails were sent out using a unique combination of real Pirate Bay user names and the email addresses those people signed up with, indicating that the sender had exploited the user database. How this happened, and whether there was a connection to the earlier hack attempt remained a mystery, but it has now become apparent that this spam attempt was not an isolated incident. Starting mid-February TorrentFreak started receiving reports of another spam attempt. This time Pirate Bay users are being encouraged to visit a website where they can allegedly download instructions on how to make money from torrent sites like The Pirate Bay. Below is a copy of one of the original emails. A slightly edited version was sent out as recently as yesterday. – Subject: Attention to all PirateBay Users Dear *Username* A course has been put together to show you how to use The PirateBay to make some serious money. This seriously works. Please visit http://www.sams101.com/ccount/click.php?XXX and download the course instructions. Because you are a torrent user and you use TPB you can do this. Pirate Team – The staff at The Pirate Bay are definitely not sending out these emails, so from where do they originate? As far as we can see it appears to be another exploit of a vulnerability in The Pirate Bay user database, one that is used for malicious purposes. Another possibility is that the same people are reusing the previously obtained data. The emails that TorrentFreak has seen all follow the same structure and link to the same page. They are sent from various addresses such as super.affilates002@gmail.com, the.pirates.teams@gmail.com and the.pirate.teams@thepiratesteam.com and all use the unique combination of a Pirate Bay username and email address of the user in question. One Pirate Bay user who received the spam email told TorrentFreak that he only used the email the spam was sent to once, to sign up at The Pirate Bay, which is a clear sign that the spam results from a compromised user database. How this info was collected is unclear at this point, and from the information we have it appears that only a subset of users is affected. During recent weeks users have mentioned the spam mails at the Pirate Bay forums, but no official explanation has been given thus far. With nearly 5 million users The Pirate Bay database is a lucrative target for spammers so new users should be weary of this and if possible use a throwaway email address when signing up. A Pirate Bay moderator told TorrentFreak that users who want to change their email address can ask for it on IRC or at the forums. An option to let users change their email addresses on the site is being considered. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What.cd first appeared online in the fall of 2007, just a handful of days after the demise of the largest music tracker at the time, OiNK. What.cd’s founders wanted to give nearly 200,000 music fans somewhere to go, a place they could call home – a torrent site to fill the void left by the closure of the Pink Palace.
This week there are four newcomers. Season of the Witch is the most downloaded movie of the week.
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