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Google Boss: We’ll Fight Anti-Piracy Blocking Laws
Download, Stream and Share Torrents With Fetch.io
Pornstar Takes Credit For Closure of World’s Largest Adult Torrent Site

Google Boss: We’ll Fight Anti-Piracy Blocking Laws

Posted: 19 May 2011 01:21 AM PDT

Google There can be little doubt that when it comes to hot tools for dealing with sites allegedly infringing the copyrights of the music and movie industries, site blocking and web filtering is absolutely in fashion this year.

The United States (with its PROTECT IP bill) and the United Kingdom (with its Digital Economy Act), are both preparing what they believe could be their best chance at a silver bullet approach to piracy – the complete blocking of ‘infringing’ domains.

Yesterday though, they discovered that apart from the usual legislative stumbling blocks, an Internet giant intends to hinder their progress.

Google is set to come out in opposition of cumbersome DNS-style blocking, perhaps giving a boost to embattled sites like The Pirate Bay and Newzbin2. These sites are at the very top of the domain-blocking wishlists of both the U.S. and UK, but neither of them are in ideal positions to mount legal challenges of their own.

Speaking after this keynote speech at Google’s Big Tent conference in London, The Guardian reports Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt as voicing clear opposition to web censorship.

“If there is a law that requires DNSs [domain name systems, the protocol that allows users to connect to websites] to do X and it’s passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it,” Schmidt said.

“If it’s a request the answer is we wouldn’t do it, if it’s a discussion we wouldn’t do it,” he added.

Schimdt went on to compare the notion of website blocking with methods used by the Chinese to censor the Internet, cautioning that when those further east see that the west aren’t opposed to censorship when it comes to achieving their particular aims, it might only encourage further crackdowns.

“I would be very, very careful if I were a government about arbitrarily [implementing] simple solutions to complex problems,” Schmidt said. “So, ‘let’s whack off the DNS’. Okay, that seems like an appealing solution but it sets a very bad precedent because now another country will say ‘I don’t like free speech so I’ll whack off all those DNSs’ – that country would be China.”

Google has a very much push-pull relationship with the content industries when it comes to infringement and potential ways of stopping it.

On the one hand Google has been helping to stop its Adsense platform being utilized by ‘pirate’ sites and has helped to partially filter some of its search features to remove ‘infringing’ suggestions. On the other it has been both help and hindrance to Hollywood by getting involved in their ongoing dispute with BitTorrent indexer isoHunt.

Yet when Google, a massively powerful organization which seems to be able to make most things turn to gold on the web, tried to reach licensing agreements with the music labels for its music locker service, it came away frustrated.

The message here is that Google is not on the side of the entertainment industries, nor on the side of the pirates. Like all companies with that all-important bottom line, it will do whatever suits its best interests. Time will tell what they are.

Source: Google Boss: We’ll Fight Anti-Piracy Blocking Laws

Download, Stream and Share Torrents With Fetch.io

Posted: 18 May 2011 02:38 PM PDT

fetch Traditionally, BitTorrent users load a .torrent file in their desktop client to download something, but today they have several alternatives, each with their own benefits.

In the past we’ve covered a wide variety of torrent-download services. However, the new startup Fetch.io is one of the most impressive we’ve seen thus far, and not just because they’re giving away accounts for free.

Fetching torrent files through Fetch.io is pretty straightforward. Users only have to paste in a torrent url and Fetch.io takes care of the download through their connection. Once the download is finished, users can transfer it to their computer, or stream it directly from the remote server if it's a video file.

But Fetch.io does more.

Aside from streaming files in one’s Internet browser, video files are also automatically encoded into flash and MP4 format a few minutes after the download has finished. This means that the files can be easily played on various mobile devices and media players, where supporting formats are automatically detected.

Besides BitTorrent, Fetch.io can also handle links from various cyberlockers including RapidShare, Megaupload, MediaFire, Hotfile, and Fileserve.

On the sharing part the service has plenty to offer also. In addition to streaming and downloading files for personal use, Fetch.io allows its users to share files directly and hassle free with friends.

Fetching a torrent at > 5MB/s

fetch

TorrentFreak talked to Rick Olson, one of the founders of Fetch.io, who told us that they’re starting their service in a phase where users aren’t charged anything.

“In the beta phase users get 20GB of storage and 40GB of bandwidth. We plan to handle as many users as possible for stress testing over the next 2 – 4 weeks. In the event we get too many beta users, instead of turning on paid accounts, we will simply close beta signup,” Olsen said.

Olsen further told us that they plan to continue offering free accounts in the future, albeit with limited storage and bandwidth capacity. The pricing of premium accounts is yet to be determined.

While testing Fetch.io we found that in most cases the download speeds of torrents are far beyond what the average downloader usually achieves. This, added to the extra anonymity the service offers and the fact that it’s free, will probably appeal to a wide audience.

And those who don’t plan to use it will profit nonetheless, as Fetch.io’s seeding policy is set at a ratio of 1:1.25. This means that they give back more to the BitTorrent swarm than they leech.

In the coming weeks the beta phase will be used to iron out the latest bugs and optimize the various features. The re-encoding times of videos will be decreased, and they’re also working on more seamless integration with external devices.

“We are already working on the Fetch app that will allow users to stream their Fetch storage contents from their computer like a media center. This project will be open source and hopefully other developers will help us make Fetch content available on more devices,” Olsen said.

Those who are interested can score a free account at Fetch.io while they last and check out the service. They can use a good stress test, so please don’t be too shy, and Fetch whatever you wish.

Source: Download, Stream and Share Torrents With Fetch.io

Pornstar Takes Credit For Closure of World’s Largest Adult Torrent Site

Posted: 18 May 2011 08:07 AM PDT

Until the end of last month, the Russian torrent tracker Pornolab had operated happily out of a datacenter in Ukraine. With previous market leaders Empornium and PureTNA dead and buried, Pornolab became the world’s largest adult BitTorrent site, serving around 2 million registered users.

Then on April 27th police in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, swooped on the site's datacenter and seized its servers. Interestingly for a case of this type, the complaints that led to this seizure were not based in copyright law, but in legislation designed to limit Ukrainian minors’ access to pornography.

The action certainly raised eyebrows. Although Pornolab is undoubtedly directing illicit traffic, under Ukrainian law it would have to be distributing the unlawful data itself to be held liable.

“In terms of procedure, it would be very difficult to hold torrent organisers responsible,” said Tetiana Popova, chief executive officer of the Internet Association of Ukraine (InAU), commenting on site operator liability.

“They do not know who seeds content or how much of it is uploaded. It is seeded in parts to many computers. The same for the leeches who receive information, gathering it in pieces from hundreds of other computers,” added Popova.

Nevertheless, with Ukraine clearly unsafe a few days later Pornolab resurfaced, this time in a Lithuanian datacenter. The move did not go well. Although the site came back online briefly it quickly disappeared, taken offline by its new host ZServers. According to Pornolab’s admin, money paid to the company is not being returned “for frivolous reasons”.

So after long periods of trouble-free running, Pornolab has been taken offline twice in less than a month and if ex-Russian pornstar and now singer Alexander Pistols is to be believed, that is down to him.

Information published by adult news site Sex News suggests that after Pistols learned that Pornolab had become one the biggest torrent sites of its type (and helping to distribute his movies), he delivered a written complaint to a Moscow prosecutor.

Five months passed and following more correspondence between Pistols and the authorities, in April the site was closed down – albeit by the Ukranian authorities as detailed above.

Two days later and after a brief relocation to Lithuania, Pornolab was down again, with Sex News claiming that Pistols was now celebrating “two victories”.

Unfortunately for Pistols though, those celebrations were cut short.

“For reasons beyond our control we were forced to change hosting provider, which led to the temporary unavailability of the tracker,” reported the admin of a yet again fully-functioning Pornolab. The site had moved further and further west, from Ukraine to Lithuania and then to their new and current home of Germany.

Whether or not Alexander Pistols really did carry enough influence with the authorities to pull these shutdowns out of the bag remains to be seen, but Pornolab don’t appear to be throwing in the towel anytime soon.

However, some user reports suggest that for at least a while the site could not be accessed in Ukraine, Lithuania or Germany. If these reports are indeed true and the blocks are persistent, the site could be taking action to firewall troublesome locations in order to fend off legal action, a strategy that has already proved successful by Ukraine-hosted Demonoid. That said, with as many as 700,000 Ukranian members, this would be a punishing move for Pornolab.

Source: Pornstar Takes Credit For Closure of World’s Largest Adult Torrent Site

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