TorrentFreak Email Update |
New Zealand 3 Strikes Begins But Pirate Sabotage Is In The Air Posted: 11 Aug 2011 03:48 AM PDT For New Zealand-based Internet users, today is the big day. Although the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Act 2011 doesn’t come into force until 1st September, infringements can be back-dated for 21 days so pirates on P2P networks are probably being logged right now. Those who are discovered uploading copyright material are first sent two warnings via their ISP. On receipt of a third, copyright holders can take Internet account holders to the Copyright Tribunal where they will face fines of up to $15,000 and disconnection. While it may sound straightforward, the steps in the previous paragraph face problems. At best the evidence gathered by rights holders is only accurate enough to identify an ISP account from where an infringement took place, it cannot identify the actual infringer. The New Zealand government have dealt with this eventuality by making account holders responsible for infringements even if they didn’t carry them out. This situation hasn’t gone unnoticed by Reddit user “drunkonthepopesblood” who says he has somehow gained access to the Internet via a government-owned connection (he doesn’t say how – could be wireless, he could be a government worker) and is now sharing copyright material. “I’m officially downloading copyrighted material on P2P protocol on Government ISP. Lets see what happens,” he announced. Several hours later his update read: “6:30am no signs of a dawn raid & thoroughly enjoying all of my newly acquired Miley Cyrus movies and soundtracks.” The clear intention here is for the government to receive 3 strikes warning notices from the entertainment companies’ P2P monitoring partners so that they are disconnected from the Internet – to give them taste of their own medicine, if you will. Gareth Hughes, ICT spokesman and MP for the Green Party has been an outspoken critic of the 3 strikes legislation. Even so, it was quite a surprise to see him pop up during the Reddit discussion. “Wow that was fast, but not surprising,” he said in response to the attempt at framing the government for illicit sharing. “I asked a series of questions [in] Parliament about this yesterday and have written to the Speaker because I don’t think he’s considered the impact this will have on him – as [the] account holder responsible for all alleged infringements,” he added. “This law could bring the gears of government to a grinding halt because the holder of the account — Parliamentary Services — provides internet access to hundreds of users anyone of whom could cause infringement notices to be sent,” he noted in a separate statement Wednesday. Hughes also levelled criticism at the government when it was revealed that the official website informing the public of the law’s implications won’t be launched until next Wednesday, one week after the infringement process begins. “The Government has a responsibility to ensure that public institutions can navigate around the new law and not run the risk of fines or disconnection,” said Hughes. “By not providing information or advice and relying on InternetNZ, Internet Service Providers, and the media, Mr Power has left schools and universities in a legal grey area.” Hughes raised the issue with Commerce Minister Simon Power during a parliamentary session yesterday (video embedded below) but the question was disallowed. However, perhaps the most disappointing part of the video comes at 4m 28s as Hughes asks Simon Power what the government is doing to encourage legal downloading, such as the uptake of Netflix. “That is a good question,” said Power, laughing into his response. “Because I have no idea what [Hughes] is referring to…” Source: New Zealand 3 Strikes Begins But Pirate Sabotage Is In The Air |
Data Centers Crippled By BitTorrent ‘Broadcast-Storm’ Posted: 10 Aug 2011 08:25 AM PDT Up until a few days ago the three 1337x BitTorrent trackers were coordinating downloads of more 40 million peers. But from one day to another, the trackers simply stopped working. As it turns out, the operator of 1337x was forced to abandon the popular TCP-based tracker and trade it in for a more efficient one using the UDP protocol instead. This means that for millions of torrents the main trackers stopped working. “Sadly we got turned away from 3 data centers in the last 2 months due to the massive amounts of bandwidth we were consuming. Sologigabit even called it a ‘broadcast-storm’ due to the massive number of concurrent connecting IP-addresses,” 1337x’s admin told TorrentFreak. Apparently the huge amount of connections were crippling the various networks, and there was no cost-efficient alternative available through which the old trackers could continue. “They put us on our own dedicated switch but could not handle our traffic effectively. So it was necessary for us to abandon the old TCP in favor of a new UDP based one,” the 1337x admin told us. The decision to change to a UDP-only tracker means that older torrents will only work if users have DHT enabled. All new torrents downloaded from the 1337x website, however, are automatically updated with the new tracker address. 1337x is not the only tracker to have gone UDP only, OpenBitTorrent has also dropped TCP support to save resources. This means that two of the three major BitTorrent trackers no longer support TCP connections. The admin of OpenBitTorrent told TorrentFreak that TCP trackers are killing central hosted services, and he suggests that BitTorrent clients should actively direct users to UDP in order to save resources. “I would be great if BitTorrent clients could make a list of popular trackers and direct all queries to the UDP version. That would lower the demand in resources but still make the tracker dual protocol,” he added. PublicBitTorrent is currently the largest tracker that still supports TCP, and it will continue to do so in the future. The main reason to continue supporting TCP is to give torrent site owners an easy option to list seeder and leecher statistics. “A lot of torrent sites are only capable of getting the stats via http, so we keep both open which is quite expensive,” the PublicBitTorrent admin told TorrentFreak. It means that they use five times more bandwidth than the other trackers, but PublicBitTorrent believes they offer a vital service to torrent site owners. “We have no plans on going UDP only, simply because we want to make sure all the torrent sites can easily access the stats,” TorrentFreak was told. For users, the switch to UDP is not going to have much of an effect. That is, if they make sure to use a recent version of a BitTorrent client that supports UDP tracker connections. According to the 1337x admin, this is not the case for everyone. “I’m finding many people are still using the older clients that do not support UDP. There is really no advantage to staying with the older clients so all BitTorrent users should be encouraged to update their clients,” we were told. BitTorrent users who want to check if their BitTorrent client supports UDP can take a look at this list. Also, it never hurts to have DHT enabled just in case one or more BitTorrent trackers go offline, something that still happens on a regular basis. Source: Data Centers Crippled By BitTorrent ‘Broadcast-Storm’ |
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