Torrentfreak: “ISP Provides Free VPN to Protect Customer Privacy” plus 4 more |
- ISP Provides Free VPN to Protect Customer Privacy
- Dotcom Faces Jail Following Application to Revoke Bail
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 11/17/14
- The Copyright Monopoly Wars Are About To Repeat, But Much Worse
- The Pirate Beacon Pimps TPB With Movie Trailers and Info
| ISP Provides Free VPN to Protect Customer Privacy Posted: 17 Nov 2014 05:36 AM PST
The Directive required Internet service providers and other telecommunications companies to log data on the activities of their subscribers, including who they communicate with and at what times, plus other identifying information such as IP addresses. One of the first companies to react to the decision was Swedish ISP Bahnhof. The ISP has a reputation for objecting to what it sees as breaches of customer privacy, so did not hesitate following the Court’s announcement. "Bahnhof stops all data storage with immediate effect. In addition, we will delete the information that was already saved," Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung said. However, at the end of last month Swedish telecoms regulator PTS ordered Bahnhof to start storing communications data again under local data retention laws, warning the ISP that non-compliance would result in hefty fines. At the time Karlung promised a “Plan B” to skirt the order, and today the details of that have emerged. “One week remains before PTS requires a fine of five million krona ($676,500) from Bahnhof, as the company has not yet begun to store customer traffic data. Therefore, Bahnhof has chosen to activate ‘Plan B’,” Karlung announced today. The plan involves Bahnhof reactivating data storage on November 24 as required. However, the ISP will thwart the collection of meaningful data by providing every customer with access to an anonymizing VPN service free of charge. “The EU Court of Justice has held that it is a human right for people not to have their traffic data stored. We therefore believe that the time is ripe for VPN services become popular,” Karlung says. The service, called LEX Integrity, is a no-logging provider so it will be impossible for any entity to get useful information about its users. “The EU Court of Justice has issued a ruling that the previous government chose to ignore, and the current government has been silent for so long that we are starting to lose patience,” Karlung adds. “So now Bahnhof will resolve the situation in a responsible manner, namely by solving the whole problem. We will start to store data, but at exactly the same time we will make data storage meaningless.” The VPN service will become active next Monday. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.    | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Dotcom Faces Jail Following Application to Revoke Bail Posted: 17 Nov 2014 01:16 AM PST
Last week it was revealed that his New Zealand legal team had backed out of their arrangement to defend the Megaupload founder. High-profile Queen's Counsel Paul Davison, QC, and Simpson Grierson, one of New Zealand's biggest lawfirms, decided to pull out, a decision that could prove pivotal in the entrepreneur getting a fair trial. It’s also transpires that lawyer Fletcher Pilditch, who was defending Dotcom colleague Finn Batato, has also withdrawn his services from the case. And back in the Auckland District Court today, things got even worse. A full report on developments isn’t possible due to a news blackout, but Crown Prosecutor Christine Gordon told the Court that an application had been made to have Dotcom’s bail revoked after an apparent breach of conditions. That application, the details of which are shrouded in secrecy, will be heard next Monday. Should it be granted, Dotcom could soon be back behind bars in New Zealand. In the meantime, apparently considering him a flight risk, Judge Nevin Dawson has taken the decision to clamp down on Dotcom’s movements ahead of next week’s hearing. In addition to banning him from using his helicopter, Dotcom is forbidden from using boats and undertaking any travel whatsoever by sea. He must stay within 80km (50 miles) of his home and report to police every single day, rather than his previous weekly check-ins. The development is yet another obstacle for Dotcom ahead of his looming 2015 extradition battle. The withdrawal of Paul Davison QC and Simson Grier was revealed today to be the decision of the lawyers, not Dotcom, with the former informing the Court that there was no intention to disrupt the case. Nevertheless, that is the immediate effect. While Dotcom and legal team chief Ira Rothken say they are in talks with other lawfirms. the scale of the case means this is no ordinary problem and one that might even prove impossible to overcome. “Suffice to say that even over the last few days, we have spoken to some of the other top firms in New Zealand,” Rothken said. “We’ve also spoken to some QCs. It’s a very difficult situation in the sense that these firms will have to look through about 100 meters of legacy files.” One interested firm said it would need 120 days just to look over the case to see they can help, a serious problem when the extradition hearing is scheduled for February and has taken 18 months to prepare. Today the Crown said it was prepared to give Dotcom an extra month by postponing the hearing until March, but that was overruled by the Judge who said that it would now take place in early June. This morning Dotcom said he will not be giving up. “This year was a total disaster. I have taken many punches. But I won’t break. I will keep going through this hell for my kids. Count on it,” Dotcom said. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 11/17/14 Posted: 16 Nov 2014 11:50 PM PST
Guardians of the Galaxy is the most downloaded movie. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Copyright Monopoly Wars Are About To Repeat, But Much Worse Posted: 16 Nov 2014 02:42 PM PST
Politicians didn’t care about the issue, but handwaved away the copyright industry by giving them private taxation rights on cassette tapes, a taxation right that would later infest anything with digital storage capacity, ranging from games consoles to digital cameras. In 1990, I bought my first modem, connecting to FidoNet, an amateur precursor to the Internet that had similar addressing and routing. We were basically doing what the Internet is used for today: chatting, discussing, sharing music and other files, buying and selling stuff, and yes, dating and flirting. Today, we do basically the same things in prettier colors, faster, and more realtime, on considerably smaller devices. But the social mechanisms are the same. The politicians were absolutely clueless. The first signal that something was seriously wrong in the heads of politicans was when they created a DMCA-like law in Sweden in 1990, one that made a server owner legally liable for forum posts made by somebody else on that server, if the server operator didn’t delete the forum post on notice. For the first time in modern history, a messenger had been made formally responsible for somebody else’s uttered opinion. People who were taking part in creating the Internet at the time went to Parliament to try to explain the technology and the social contract of responsibilities, and walked away utterly disappointed and desperate. The politicians were even more clueless than imagined. It hasn’t gotten better since. Cory Doctorow’s observation in his brilliant speech about the coming war on general computing was right: Politicians are clueless about the Internet because they don’t care about the Internet. They care about energy, healthcare, defense, education, and taxes, because they only understand the problems that defined the structures of the two previous generations – the structures now in power have simply retained their original definition, and those are the structures that put today’s politicians in power. Those structures are incapable of adapting to irrelevance. Enter bitcoin. The unlicensed manufacturing of movie and music copies were and are such small time potatoes the politicians just didn’t and don’t have time for it, because energy healthcare defense. Creating draconian laws that threaten the Internet wasn’t an “I think this is a good idea” behavior. It has been a “copyright industry, get out of my face” behavior. The copryight industry understands this perfectly, of course, and throws tantrums about every five years to get more police-like powers, taxpayer money, and rent from the public coffers. Only when the population has been more in the face of politicians than the copyright industry – think SOPA, ACTA – have the politicians backpedaled, usually with a confused look on their faces, and then absentmindedly happened to do the right thing before going back to energy healthcare defense. However, cryptocurrency like bitcoin – essentially the same social mechanisms, same social protocols, same distributed principles as BitTorrent’s sharing culture and knowledge outside of the copyright industry’s monopolies – is not something that passes unnoticed. Like BitTorrent showed the obsolescence of the copyright monopoly, bitcoin demonstrates the obsolescence of central banks and today’s entire financial sector. Like BitTorrent didn’t go head-to-head with the copyright monopoly but just circumvented it as irrelevant, bitcoin circumvents every single financial regulation as irrelevant. And like BitTorrent saw uptake in the millions, so does bitcoin. Cryptocurrency is politically where culture-sharing was in about 1985. Politicians didn’t care about the copyright monopoly. They didn’t. Don’t. No, they don’t, not in the slightest. That’s why the copyright industry has been given everything they point at. Now for today’s million dollar question: do you think politicians care about the authority of the central bank and the core controllability of funds, finances, and taxation? YES. VERY MUCH. This is going to get seriously ugly. But this time, we have a blueprint from the copyright monopoly wars. Cory Doctorow was right when he said this isn’t the war, this is just the first skirmish over control of society as a whole. The Internet generation is claiming that control, and the old industrial generation is pushing back. Hard. We’ve already seen the magic trigger words usually applied to culture-sharing being tried on bitcoin. Like this infamous quote: “Bitcoin is used to buy illegal drugs!” Since this is laughably used in defense of the US Dollar, that argument cannot go uncountered by the trivial observation that “So… you’re claiming that the US Dollar isn’t?”. But we’re already seeing the arguments that were used in the copyright monopoly battle getting rehashed against the next generation of peer-to-peer technology. The exact same trigger words: organized crime, file sharing, child porn, drug trade. The trigger words that mirror the way “communism” was used in the US in the 1950. And “jazz music” before then, by the way. Beyond bitcoin, there are technologies like Ethereum and Counterparty, which aim to make the more core services of government – incorporation, courts, arbitration – obsolete and circumvented. The old structures will not accept that development sitting down. The entire copyright monopoly war is about to repeat. But rather than brushing it off because politicians don’t care about what’s being discussed, this time, the technology and social changes are going to be attacking the very core power of politicians head-on. This time, they will try to crush technology and its users quite deliberately, rather than out of ignorance. This time, they will hold no punches and consider no balance against rights to privacy, life, happiness, or liberty. But this time we’re ready. This time, we have a blueprint for exactly what will happen, because the copyright monopoly wars were the tutorial missions in the game of civil liberties. To be honest, we haven’t played the tutorial very well. But we know all the adversary’s capabilities, moves, and patterns now. The end of that development is either a Big Brother society beyond dystopian nightmares, or a society where cryptocurrency is firmly established and the copyright monopoly has also been abolished to cheers and whistles from a new, liberated generation, who have new problems to deal with instead of those that defined our grandparents’ generation.  About The Author Rick Falkvinge is a regular columnist on TorrentFreak, sharing his thoughts every other week. He is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, a whisky aficionado, and a low-altitude motorcycle pilot. His blog at falkvinge.net focuses on information policy. Book Falkvinge as speaker? Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Pirate Beacon Pimps TPB With Movie Trailers and Info Posted: 16 Nov 2014 08:28 AM PST
Since not all titles immediately ring a bell, they often use third-party sites and services such as IMDb to find more info. In fact, nearly 2% of all IMDb visitors browsed The Pirate Bay before coming to the site, and vice versa. To save these users a few clicks there is now a new browser extension that pulls up movie information automatically. The Pirate Beacon, as it’s called, shows users descriptions, IMDb ratings and trailers when users hover over Pirate Bay link. We reached out to Jordan, the developer of Pirate Beacon, who tells us that the idea actually came from a friend who made a mockup of the discovery tool last year. After working on it for a while the project was shelved, but last Saturday he picked it up again. A few hours of coding later The Pirate Beacon was online. The extension uses IMDb links to gather movie info, so it’s only available for torrents that have this listed. The trailers are then pulled from trailersapi.com and when this fails a movie poster is displayed instead. “It works pretty good for newer movies but doesn’t do so well for older ones. So if I can't find a trailer, I fall back to the IMDb posters api to grab a movie poster for it,” Jordan says.  Jordan explains that the addon will help people to gather info about movies without having to leave the site, which can be quite cumbersome at times. “I think it is most useful for discovery purposes. If you’ve ever spent any time browsing TPB you will know that it’s somewhat annoying to see a movie that you’ve not heard of then have to go find it. This just takes that annoyance away,” Jordan. The idea appeals to a lot of fellow Pirate Bay users as it has immediately started to gain traction. After an initial Chrome release it’s now available for Firefox too. Additionally, support for many TPB proxies has been added as well. Jordan says he will continue to work on the project. Support for the Opera browser is one of the next items on the todo list, and he also wants to add support for more torrent sites, starting with KickassTorrents. “I am planning to expand it to other torrent sites as well. People have been requesting it to work with some other sites. It’s now available on Firefox and Chrome and soon to be available on Opera,” he notes. The Pirate Beacon’s source code is available on GitHub and the Chrome and Firefox extensions are up on the official site. The MPAA, meanwhile, is trying to steer people away from The Pirate Bay. The movie group launched its own search engine earlier this week. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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