Torrentfreak: “Premier League to Clamp Down on GIFs and Vines” plus 1 more

Premier League to Clamp Down on GIFs and Vines

Posted: 15 Aug 2014 01:02 AM PDT

When Steve Wilhite of Compuserve created the GIF format in the late 80s, he probably didn’t imagine it would be in use more than a quarter of a century later.

Against the odds, in 2012 the GIF celebrated its 25th birthday, a fitting tribute to a format that has not only endured but also enjoyed a resurgence alongside today’s meme culture. However, the tiny video clips available in today’s GIFs aren’t appreciated by everyone.

On the eve of the new season, the UK’s Premier League has been putting fans on notice that it will no longer tolerate the unauthorized distribution of its copyright works. In addition to going after those who live stream full matches, the football giant says it now intends to tackle individuals who post short clips online.

According to the League, the problem is being caused by fans who record goals and upload them as GIFs and Vines within a few minutes of the event. These spread virally around blogs and sites such as Twitter and are enthusiastically consumed, especially on mobile devices.

“You can understand that fans see something, they can capture it, they can share it, but ultimately it is against the law,” Dan Johnson, director of communications at the Premier League, told the BBC.

These over-enthusiastic fans sharing a few seconds of footage – often at particularly low quality – are apparently causing financial hardship for the most-watched football league in the world. So, to bring that to an end, the Premier League are looking towards a technological solution.

“It’s a breach of copyright and we would discourage fans from doing it, we’re developing technologies like gif crawlers, Vine crawlers, working with Twitter to look to curtail this kind of activity,” Johnson said.

“I know it sounds as if we’re killjoys but we have to protect our intellectual property.”

Going after those who place short video clips online is not new. There have been several reports in the past few months of UFC owner Zuffa taking action against individuals who upload GIFs, with a recent purge in July against content hosted on popular hoster GfyCat.

While fans insist that GIFs of goals and knockouts are simply free promotion, the rights to show such things don’t come cheap. UK tabloid The Sun has an app which shows Premier League goals within two minutes of the moment, but fans have to pay £7 per month ($11.68) to access it.

As the UFC have no doubt realized by now (and the Premier League soon will), taking down GIFs will be a huge resource drain and will do little to stop availability of content. The files are too tiny, far too easily shared and come from potentially thousands of directions. Add to this the problem of having to nuke content in near real-time, and this becomes an unsolvable problem, at least by enforcement means.

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

Popcorn Time Hit By Massive DDoS Attack

Posted: 14 Aug 2014 08:29 AM PDT

Every year sees periods when sites in the file-sharing sector are subjected to denial of service attacks. The attackers and their motives are often unknown and eventually the assaults pass away.

Early in 2014 many torrent sites were hit, pushing some offline and forcing others to invest in mitigation technology. In May a torrent related host suffered similar problems.

Today it’s the turn of the main open source Popcorn Time fork to face the wrath of attackers unknown. TorrentFreak spoke with members of the project including Ops manager XeonCore who told us that the attack is massive.

“We are currently mitigating a large scale DDoS attack across our entire network. We are currently rerouting all traffic via some of our high bandwidth nodes and are working on imaging and getting our remaining servers back online to help deal with the load,” the team explain.

The attack is project-wide with huge amounts of traffic hitting all parts of the network, starting with the site hosting the Popcorn Time source code.

Attack on the source code site – 980Mbps

source

Also under attack is the project’s CDN and API. The graph below shows one of the project’s servers located in France. The green shows the normal traffic from the API server, the blue represents the attack.

Attack on the France API server – 931Mbps

france-api

Not even the project’s DNS servers have remained untouched. At one point two of three DNS servers went down, with a third straining under almost 1Gbps of traffic. To be sure, a fourth DNS server was added to assist with the load.

Attack on the Dutch DNS server – peaking at 880Mbps

dutch-dns

All told the whole network is being hit with almost 10Gbps of traffic, but the team is working hard to keep things operational.

“We’ve added additional capacity. Our DNS servers are currently back up and running but there is still severe congestion around Europe and America. Almost 10Gbps across the entire network. Still working on mitigating. API is still online for most users!” they conclude.

Nobody has yet claimed responsibility for the attack and it’s certainly possible things will remain that way. Only time will tell when the attack will subside, but the team are determined to keep their project online in the meantime.

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