TorrentFreak Email Update

Kino.to Uploader Speaks Out, Cyberlockers Down, Anon DDoS

Posted: 11 Jun 2011 04:34 AM PDT

Three days ago, 13 German nationals were arrested in an operation carried out against movie and TV show links site Kino.to.

The raids, which involved 250 police and other authorities tackling 42 locations in Germany, Spain, France and the Netherlands, followed an intensive investigation carried out by the Hollywood-backed anti-piracy group GVU.

The main suspect is said to have been detained in Leipzig and another arrestee in Spain. One individual is still at large (possibly the admin of cyberlocker service, unconfirmed) and another has since been released. As of Thursday evening, reports suggested the rest remained in custody.

As we are aware, Kino.to hosted no illegal content, but indexed material and provided links to movies and TV shows stored on file-hosters and other streaming services.

Crucially, those links have to be put there by someone and that task fell to Kino.to’s loose-knit team of link uploaders. In the wake of the site’s demise, one of them has just broken ranks and given an interesting interview on how parts of the site operated.

Speaking under the assumed name John Sandy, the uploader said that he regularly supplied Kino.to with links to documentaries and US TV shows, the most-viewed content on the site.

The links offered by Sandy were submitted to a hidden area of the site and were subsequently moderated, probably for duplicates and quality. Whether this process was carried out by man or machine, Sandy isn’t sure. Successful links went on to make it to the site’s public facing webpage for regular users to access.

Sandy says that he had no contact with the site’s operators and there was no direct financial reward for uploading TV show links to Kino.to. However, Sandy said that there is money in uploading content to file-hosters and he had made around $1,000 per month by generating traffic to these sites.

“I don’t see myself as a criminal,” Sandy explained. “If America can watch these series episodes for free and legally, why should this be not allowed in Germany?”

While GVU and Hollywood won’t be pleased that US TV shows were available via links on Kino.to, it’s fair to say that the addition of hundreds, maybe thousands of movies proved even less popular. The sheer size of the site and its prominence meant that it was just a matter of time before it became a target.

However, while all of the publicity has been focused on the takedown of Kino.to, either by design or huge coincidence at least four German-hosted storage sites – Duckload.com, Frog Movz, Karamba Vidz and Loombo – all suddenly disappeared after the raid.

TorrentFreak is informed that the admin of Duckload was one of the individuals sought by the police and that their operation – which is believed to be around 500 servers – was completely shutdown. Initially the feeling was that Duckload would return, but it the seriousness of the situation appears to be hitting home and that seems unlikely, at least at this stage.

Several other hosters in a range of locations are also down. They include archiv.to, quickload.to, tubeload.to and loaded.it. Whether not they were connected to Kino.to, or the indeed the raids, remains to be seen. Another cyberlocker – Freeload.to – was definitely connected since it’s now displaying the same shutdown notice as Kino.to.

But these sites aren’t the only ones connected to the operation which had their services disrupted this week. The website of GVU, the anti-piracy brains behind the Kino.to takedown, was also taken offline following a DDoS attack carried out by Anonymous.

German members of the group put up a video on YouTube describing the attack and according to a translation by Janko Roettgers, they declared the following:

"We believe that running a search engine for videos isn't illegal… That's why we immediately reacted by taking down the GVU website… Knowledge is free, and streaming is, too."

The DDoS attack itself had limited effect and the GVU site is now fully operational, which is more than can be said for Kino.to and several file-hosting services. Nevertheless, rumors of a Kino.to resurrection from an old site backup are circulating. Stranger things have happened but that would be a particularly brave move, particularly in Europe.

Source: Kino.to Uploader Speaks Out, Cyberlockers Down, Anon DDoS

BitTorrent.com and Archive.org Blacklisted as Pirate Sites by Major Advertiser

Posted: 10 Jun 2011 11:19 AM PDT

blocked GroupM is a leading player in the advertising world, spending several billion dollars buying ads on websites each year. The company represents many top brands worldwide and has more than 17,000 employees and 400 offices.

In keeping with a company of its stature, GroupM is very diligent when it comes to the placement of their clients’ ads. To ensure ‘legit’ advertising placements, this week GroupM introduced a blacklist designed to prevent its clients' ads from appearing on websites that distribute illegally obtained content.

"We're serious about combating piracy and protecting our clients' intellectual property as forcefully as we possibly can," said GroupM North America CEO Rob Norman in the press release.

"Pirate sites are known to 'domain hop,' so we need to keep on top of the latest list of identified offenders as best as we possibly can in order to enforce this new policy to its fullest effect," Norman added.

Indeed, companies that maintain a blacklist have to be on top of it, and compile the list with the utmost care. The last thing they want is to miss a potential pirate site, or indeed the opposite – include websites that don’t offer or link to unauthorized downloads at all.

GroupM was kind enough to share the full list of 2279 domains with TorrentFreak, so we could see for ourselves how accurate their list is. As we suspected, there’s still a lot of work to do for the advertising giant.

Among the ‘pirate’ websites that are currently listed we find the non-profit digital library Archive.org, which isn’t particularly known for offloading warez. Also listed is the website of BitTorrent Inc., the San Francisco based company which only offers its own software for download.

Neither of the above sites carry advertising at the moment, which limits the effects of the blacklist, but they are undoubtedly unhappy being branded as pirates.

“BitTorrent is simply a technology company that enables people to efficiently move large files over the Internet. We don’t distribute unauthorized content, though we do work with many independent artists to help distribute their works,” BitTorrent Inc’s Senior Director of Marketing Allison Wagda told TorrentFreak.

Aside from Archive.org and BitTorrent.com there are various other websites in the list which don’t offer or even link to copyrighted material. The file-sharing clients Frostwire, Emule, BitTornado, SoulSeek and Acquisition for example, the IRC client mIRC and the ‘legal’ torrent search engines Mininova, Publicdomaintorrents and YouTorrent.com.

Other websites that are not directly linked to piracy are the Russian Facebook Vkontakte, the video portal Suprnova.org and the Linux distro site Tuxdistro.com.

And then there are many file-hosting services such as RapidShare, YouSendit and the late Drop.io that are in the grey area to say the least. All are banned from serving ads. Those who take a good look at the list will see many websites that are not necessarily linked to copyright infringement, but are included nonetheless.

GroupM’s failed effort to compile a completely accurate anti-piracy blacklist once again shows the problem with these types of censorship; the collateral damage. Although one can certainly make a case for blocking many of the listed sites, it also puts several obviously non-infringing sites in the same corner.

Although there are problems, rather than hide behind a veil of secrecy, GroupM has been bold enough to allow their list into the open, a level of transparency rarely seen in these instances. GroupM was asked to comment on our findings, and we will add their response to the article when it comes in.

The Blacklist

Source: BitTorrent.com and Archive.org Blacklisted as Pirate Sites by Major Advertiser

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