TorrentFreak Email Update

UK Police Shutdown File-Host Search Engine FileCrop

Posted: 24 May 2014 02:50 AM PDT

Following its launch in the last quarter of 2013, City of London Police’s Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) has been working hard to disrupt the activities of sites in the file-sharing arena.

The Unit works on the recommendations of international music, movie and TV companies but is financed by the UK taxpayer, funding set to continue if Prime Minister David Cameron’s IP advisor has his way.

PIPCU’s activities began with the sending of warning emails to many domains around the world, warning them that non-compliance with police requests would result in further action. That action has taken several forms, including the attempted seizure of domains, reported disruption of advertising revenue, through to physical raids such as the one carried out on Boxing Guru earlier this year.

Today there are clear signs of further action by PIPCU. During the past few hours, file-sharing site FileCrop disappeared from the Internet, to be replaced by the PIPCU notice shown below.

While it’s not particularly unusual for PIPCU to target file-sharing related sites, what is special in this case is the nature of the FileCrop operation. FileCrop wasn’t a non-responsive Pirate Bay style torrent site, nor was it a file-hosting site operating on the boundaries of the law.

As illustrated by the image below, FileCrop was a search engine that allowed its users to seek content hosted on various file-lockers around the world including RapidShare, Mediafire and Mega, sites that all have strict notice-and-takedown procedures.

While the police making a search engine a priority target seems somewhat unusual (FileCrop also responded to takedowns), the targeting of FileCrop doesn’t come as a complete surprise. In mid 2013 the BPI began preparations to have another batch of domains blocked by local ISPs.

FileCrop.com was included in that list and before the year it was mostly inaccessible in the UK. The Alexa chart below suggests that the blockade had quite an effect on FileCrop’s popularity.

While there has been no announcement from City of London Police, previous actions resulting in the displaying of the “under investigation” banner shown above have always followed boots-on-the-ground efforts by the authorities. This suggests a UK presence for FileCrop’s owners or operators, although examination of the site’s WHOIS entries suggests that the domain owner is located in Ukraine.

Another unusual aspect to the case is why police would prioritize a site that apparently causes relatively few problems for rightsholders. While Google received more than 659,000 complaints last month against Fileshut.biz, a functionally similar site, the search engine has been receiving an average of just 37 complaints a week against FileCrop.

TorrentFreak’s requests for information from the police have gone unanswered this morning, suggesting that it will be next week before more is known about this case.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Public BitTorrent Trackers Ban Piracy Monitoring Outfits

Posted: 23 May 2014 09:12 AM PDT

OpenBitTorrent, PublicBitTorrent and Istole.it are the largest BitTorrent trackers on the Internet, coordinating the downloads of tens of millions of file-sharers every day. The non-commercial services don’t host or link to torrent files themselves.

The trackers provide a useful function for the public, but are also used by copyright holders to track down pirates. This includes the companies that are used for the various “strikes” initiatives around the world, and various copyright trolls.

To make these increasing snooping efforts more difficult, the tracker operators have decided to take a drastic measure. The three top trackers have all implemented a ban list which includes the IP-address ranges of many of the larger hosting providers, which are frequently used by anti-piracy firms.

The operator of one of the trackers informed TorrentFreak that the measure will help to keep anti-piracy monitoring firms at bay. At least, those who use services of large hosting firms such as Leaseweb.

However, there is also a downside to the measures. Since many VPN services, proxies and seedboxes also use these hosting providers, they are banned as well. The tracker operators are aware of these consequences, but note that there are ways to circumvent the ban.

Also, affected services and users can still connect to DHT and PEX, which essentially makes the trackers obsolete. By using DHT, BitTorrent users are creating their own peer-to-peer trackers. The tracker operator we spoke to recommends enabling DHT whenever possible.

“Trackers are really not needed anymore for torrents to work. All BitTorrent users should switch to DHT primarily,” he says.

One of the collateral damage victims of the ban is torrent download service Put.io. They have quickly enabled DHT and PEX to ensure that torrents can still be downloaded, and will take measures to ensure that the trackers can be used through a separate server in the future.

“Right now turning on DHT and PEX brought some relief, but this limits our speed in finding peers and in general, our options. We will try our best to first get off those lists and then find a way to route the announce traffic over another server so this doesn’t happen again,” Put.io’s Hasan Yalcinkaya informed us.

Of course, anti-piracy outfits could take similar steps to bypass the ban. However, several are believed to rely solely on trackers for the time being. How effective the IP-address blacklist will be in the long run has yet to be seen.

The measure is not the silver bullet that will stop all anti-piracy outfits, but it’s certainly not making it any easier monitor file-sharers. So for once, they will be the ones who have to circumvent a blockade.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.