TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Playstation Network Shut Down To End Piracy Free-For-All
- FBI Bust Hollywood Insider Over Pirate Bay Uploads
- BTjunkie Starts Proxy to Bypass Italian Blockade
| Playstation Network Shut Down To End Piracy Free-For-All Posted: 26 Apr 2011 12:58 AM PDT Last week Sony shut down its PlayStation Network (PSN) and in the information vacuum that followed, fingers were mainly pointed at Anonymous – had they pulled off another of their paralyzing DDoS attacks? Quickly, however, Anonymous denied the accusations, even going as far as issuing a press release claiming innocence. Then another day passed. And another. And another. This was clearly more than a DDoS but Sony were keeping very quiet – almost too quiet. Eventually Sony admitted they had been subjected to some sort of attack. Yesterday they made another announcement, informing their user base that the whole system will be offline indefinitely. No further information from Sony but there is a man who thinks he knows what causing the extended downtime. ‘Chesh’ is a staff member from psx-scene.com, a site dedicated to hacking and modding Playstations. Together with various developers in the scene he’s been putting all the pieces together and if his theory holds, Sony has been battling their biggest crisis yet. Chesh believes that the problem stems from the availability of a new CFW (custom firmware) for the Playstation 3. CFW’s give hardware modified functionality and REBUG, as it’s known, turns a standard PS3 into a machine which provides access to some of the PSN’s features usually reserved for developers. REBUG, which was released on the last day of March, apparently has a trick up its sleeve in that it is able to get previously hacked Playstation 3 consoles back online after they’d been excluded by Sony. It’s not a feature built in by design, but one that users have learned how to exploit. Chesh reports that some REBUG users were initially using it to play Call of Duty on the dev networks around April 3rd. Neat enough in itself but there was a monster in the shadows. Since REBUG allowed users to connect to a previously secure and private developer network, certain information provided by users wasn’t security checked by Sony. According to Chesh, one of the items whose authenticity was never checked was – unbelievably – credit card numbers. People could apparently make them up and get access to whatever content they wanted. “What happened next was extreme piracy of PSN content,” Chesh explained. He said that over on PSX-Scene he learned of people downloading free Sony content from the dev networks on April 7th. As we know, Sony shut down the entire PSN on April 20th and it remains down today. Since Sony have told their customers next to nothing about the problems it has faced – including whether or not credit card information is safe – it’s a safe bet that none of the above will be confirmed or denied. Chesh himself admits that while the above information is true, he can’t verify 100% if it’s the absolute reason why Sony pulled the PSN offline. That said, it’s a big enough problem for them to do so and if Sony has pulled the plug for another unknown reason, their problems only go deeper. And it’s hard to imagine a situation worse than this. Source: Playstation Network Shut Down To End Piracy Free-For-All |
| FBI Bust Hollywood Insider Over Pirate Bay Uploads Posted: 25 Apr 2011 02:19 PM PDT
The tipoff in this case came from the MPAA’s director of content protection Larry Hahn, who informed the FBI about the five films that were uploaded to The Pirate Bay. DeSoto allegedly operated under the username ‘mf34inc’, and although all uploaded torrents have now been removed, Google’s cache reveals that this user uploaded The King’s Speech, Rabbit Hole, 127 Hours, The Fighter and Black Swan between January 23 and January 29. In the comments section of The King’s Speech upload, mf34inc notes that the film’s source is an “iTunes SAG HD screener, only available to SAG members” and that the “torrent is real.” In another comment the user claims to have access to a screener of The Social Network as well, but that he wont release it because there are various high quality uploads of the movie already. According to a copy of the affidavit obtained by Wired.com, during the raid the FBI searched for software and records relating to the release group 'TiMPE' and 'thepiratebay.org'. The nature of the alleged relationship between and DeSoto and the release group is unclear at this point, but it could be related to the watermarks that led the FBI to the actor who himself starred in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. When speaking with Wired, DeSoto declined to comment but said he has no affiliation with the release group. "I'm nobody in the online file sharing world. This investigation is excessive and a waste of tax dollars," he noted. As seen in similar cases, the affidavit references the crime of “uploading a copyrighted work being prepared for commercial distribution,” which is a term under the tough Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Although no charges have yet been filed, the above legislation was previously used to jail Star Wars uploaders at the now-defunct EliteTorrents site, and to put the Dark Knight cammer behind bars for two years. |
| BTjunkie Starts Proxy to Bypass Italian Blockade Posted: 25 Apr 2011 06:10 AM PDT
Last week’s actions are similar to an earlier Italian block of The Pirate Bay that was first ordered in 2008. After an appeal process of nearly two years, The Pirate Bay was eventually blocked both completely and permanently last year. TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of BTjunkie who told us that he does not intent to appeal the court order. However, that doesn’t mean that Italian users wont be able to access the site anymore. As it turns out, with just one simple step Italians can have full access to BTjunkie again, as well as every other censored website. Italian visitors whose ISPs have not yet implemented the block now see the following message. “Attention Italians: BTjunkie will soon be blocked following an Italian judicial complaint. You can continue to access the site through proxyitalia.com/btjunkie.org” A message to Italian BTjunkie usersIndeed, all BTjunkie users have to do to gain access to their favorite torrent site is update their bookmarks to use the proxy site. And this is not limited to BTjunkie either. The proxyitalia.com site works for The Pirate Bay as well, or any other site that may be blocked in the future. BTjunkie’s action shows how futile web censorship is. Aside from updating one’s bookmarks to use the proxy URL, there are plenty of other ways to bypass the block. A particularly popular solution is signing up with a VPN service, which assigns users a foreign IP-address, lifting all local restrictions. And the above is no secret to Italians. As of today, hundreds of thousands of Italian BitTorrent users use The Pirate Bay website despite a nationwide censorship order. And even those who stop using The Pirate Bay can still choose from dozens of other large indexes to score their daily BitTorrent fix. Apparently, censorship is not the best solution for decreasing piracy. Needless to say, the authorities are not too fond of the proxy sites that allows Italians to bypass their court orders. A proxy site that was setup in response to the Pirate Bay blockade was quickly pulled offline by the authorities last year, but ultimately they’re fighting a losing battle. To add to this, shutting down proxyitalia.com will not be so easy as it’s a general purpose proxy. Unlike the Pirate Bay proxy site it can be used with all URLs, so if the authorities block the proxy site they might as well block the thousands of other proxy sites that exist on the Internet too. As John Gilmore famously said: “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” Perhaps, then, the only way to succeed is to shut the Internet down altogether. |
Screen Actor's Guild member 
Last Thursday the public prosecutor of the Sardinian capital Cagliari 
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