TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Turkey’s Twitter Ban Collapse Fueled By VPNs and DNS Tricks
- Nuking a Facebook Page on Bogus Copyright Grounds is Easy
- Pirate Bay Founder Gets Ready to Run for European Parliament
| Turkey’s Twitter Ban Collapse Fueled By VPNs and DNS Tricks Posted: 22 Mar 2014 02:57 AM PDT
“I don’t care what the international community says at all. Everyone will see the power of the Turkish Republic,” Erdogan said on Thursday. Angry that Twitter did not respond to requests by Turkish courts to remove material that showed him in a bad light, Erdogan swung the banhammer and by Friday everything was in place. Turkish visitors to Twitter were greeted with notices displayed by their ISPs indicating that Twitter had been blocked by court order. “Because there was no other choice, access to Twitter was blocked in line with court decisions to avoid the possible future victimisation of citizens,” Turkish telecoms watchdog BTK said on Friday. What followed was anger from citizens, then delicious payback against yet another government trying – and ultimately failing – to artificially restrict access to information on the Internet. Rather than bow to Erdogan’s wishes, Turkish citizens reacted in much the same that file-sharers around the world have done when sites such as The Pirate Bay were blocked by their ISPs. They took to the open web to spread the word on how to circumvent web censorship but in a fresh twist, they also took to the streets The wonderful image below, ironically posted to Twitter itself, shows a poster on a Turkish street explaining how to change DNS settings to obliterate the Twitter ban.  Another photograph, again posted to Twitter, shows graffiti on a housing block informing people of the IP addresses used by Google’s DNS service rather than the ‘infected’ ones offered by local ISPs.  But while these images will be a delight to anti-censorship advocates everywhere, it was online that the real battle was taking place. Here at TF we noticed an unusual level of interest from Turkish visitors in our latest VPN article and then later in the day the effect on VPN takeup was confirmed by the company behind Hotspot Shield. AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky told WSJ that 270,000 Turkish users installed their software in one 12 hour period Friday versus around 10,000 on a normal day, a huge increase by any standards. TorrentFreak spoke with Andrew Lee at Private Internet Access who explained that while his company does not track the identities or locations of its customers, there had definitely been an uptick in signups following the introduction of Twitter censorship in Turkey. “More and more, we are seeing that censorship is a form of control that the weak use in an attempt to hang onto power. In addition to Turkey, we can also see this happening in China, the United Kingdom and other various countries,” Lee explained. “Fortunately, the people of this world, including Turkey, are strong, and democracy will continue to stand. As such, the attempt to censor Twitter in Turkey has all but failed.” This article began with the suggestion that censorship of the type imposed by Turkey is something to be embraced. Not welcomed, of course, but treated as an opportunity to gain knowledge on how the Internet works and how web blockades can be circumvented. Those who think they can control the Internet and people’s right to communicate should be made to think again and in Turkey this week that point has been admirably made. According to analysis site Zete.com, tweets in Turkey before the ban numbered 10 million a day – they now sit at 24 million. Update: According to a local report, Turkey has now blocked Google’s DNS. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| Nuking a Facebook Page on Bogus Copyright Grounds is Easy Posted: 21 Mar 2014 11:28 AM PDT
Both parties have good reason to progress. Copyright holders say the are tired of taking down content only to have it reappear quickly after. On the other hand, service providers and similar web companies burn through significant resources ensuring they respond to takedown demands in a way that maintains their protection from liability. This fear of the law encourages service providers to err on the side of caution by taking content down quickly, and worrying about legitimacy later. Earlier this week TF spoke with a site operator with first hand experience of a major Internet company’s approach to what they believed to be a genuine copyright complaint. As previously reported, BeBe is the operator of Wrestling-Network, a site that links to unauthorized WWE streams. While the legality of his main domain is up for lively debate, he maintains his Facebook page was squeaky clean when a WWE lawyer moved to have it taken down. What we didn’t report at the time is that this wasn’t the first time Wrestling-Network had lost a Facebook page. “We've removed or disabled access to the following content that you posted on Facebook because we received a report from a third-party that the content infringes their copyright(s),” Facebook told BeBe in an email. BeBe wrote back to try and resolve matters, offering to put things right should there have been a copyright-related oversight. But Facebook weren’t interested in being the middle-man in this dispute, instead directing BeBe to contact the person who filed the complaint against him. “If you believe that we have made a mistake in removing this content, then please contact the complaining party directly.[..],” Facebook responded. Once furnished with the complainant’s details BeBe recognized them as belonging to a person he’d been in an unrelated dispute with. Despite using a Yahoo email address (rather than @wwe.com), the fake copyright complainer had convinced Facebook to shut down a page in the name of a third-party. Worse still, BeBe would now have to negotiate with his adversary in order to get his page back. “If both parties agree to restore the reported content, please ask the complaining party to contact us via email with a copy of the agreement so that we can refer to the original issue,” Facebook explained. “We will not be able to restore this content to Facebook unless we receive explicit notice of consent from the complaining party.” Fake copyright reports like this aren’t new. In 2011 there was a spate of false notices which saw well-known Facebook pages belonging to Ars Technica, Neowin and Redwood Pie all being taken down by fraudulent complaints. Three years ago it was exceptionally easy to take down a page, but here we are several years later and the process is still open to abuse. So how easy is it to nuke a Facebook page? On condition of anonymity, a person who targeted another’s Facebook page out of revenge explained. “Taking down the Facebook page was simple. It requires a well written and thought out mail, directly sent to Facebook, but it was a very straight forward process,” TF was told. “I did not pretend to be [a rightsholder] however. I claimed to be a company that handles such legal aspects for big corporations without them being directly involved, in order to avoid public backlash but at the same time protect their interests. I provided enough copyrighted posts to prove that the page was a constant abuser and the page was taken down.” According to PCWorld, during the Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force’s first public forum yesterday, Ben Sheffner, vice president of legal affairs for the MPAA, said that erroneous or abusive notices were a tiny part of the DMCA picture and should be afforded appropriate levels of attention. Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saw things quite differently. Takedown abuse “regularly causes quite an uproar,” McSherry said. “Any multistakeholder dialog that was talking about the notice-and-takedown system and trying to improve it that didn’t include a discussion of takedown abuse would really have no legitimacy in the eyes of many, many Internet users.” The problem might be small to the MPAA, but of course it’s not their Facebook page getting targeted. To smaller players the problem can be significantly more severe. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
| Pirate Bay Founder Gets Ready to Run for European Parliament Posted: 21 Mar 2014 05:10 AM PDT
The former Pirate Bay spokesperson announced his plans last year, but with the European Parliament elections coming closer this idea has now become reality. Sunde is currently listed as one of the 19 candidates who will be on the voting ballot of the Finnish branch of the Pirate Party. Unlike in other countries, the Finnish candidate lists are not in order, which means that there is no lead candidate. However, due to his involvement with The Pirate Bay, Sunde is without a doubt the most recognized name on the ballot. As if the candidacy for the European Parliament isn’t enough, today the European Pirate Party also elected the Pirate Bay founder as their pick for the European Commission presidency, together with Amelia Andersdotter. TF reached out to Sunde who is happy to hear the good news. "If elected, I'll go and bug fix the EU. We need to reboot the thing called democracy and make it work." he told us. In addition, Sunde told us that he’s ready for the Finnish election campaign which will kick off during the coming weeks. As can be expected of the Pirate Bay founder, he has strong opinions on the topic of file-sharing and freedom of information. Sunde believes that the Pirate Party can make a huge difference in the European Parliament, as the two current members – Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter – have already shown. If Sunde is elected, he hopes to revamp current copyright law and legalize casual file-sharing. “Non-commercial file sharing should of course become legal and protected, and we must re-think copyright all together. Copyright is not the thing that makes ARTISTS money, it’s only for their brokers and distributors,” Sunde told us previously.  Copying is baked into people’s genes according to Sunde, quite literally. “People learn by copying others. All the knowledge we have today, and all success is based on this simple fact – we are copies,” Sunde notes in his bio. Amusingly, Sunde told TF that he also reached out to Finnish-born Kim Dotcom to join the race. However, the Megaupload founder decided to focus his political aspirations on New Zealand instead, where he founded the Internet Party. Aside from politics, Sunde himself is still involved in several other projects that are dear to his heart. This includes the micro-donation service Flattr and the encrypted messaging app Heml.is which is expected to be released later this year. The latter may come in handy in Brussels, as the NSA is known to spy on political figures. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. |
Despite a pending prison term for his involvement with The Pirate Bay, Peter Sunde is determined to join the European Parliament in Brussels. | You are subscribed to email updates from TorrentFreak To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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