Torrentfreak: “ExtraTorrent Down After Huge DDoS Attack” plus 3 more |
- ExtraTorrent Down After Huge DDoS Attack
- Pirate Bay’s Mystery AES Code Finally Decrypted
- Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 01/12/15
- U.S. ‘Strikes’ Scheme Fails to Impact Piracy Landscape
| ExtraTorrent Down After Huge DDoS Attack Posted: 12 Jan 2015 02:22 AM PST
The current top 10 torrent sites in the world are the largest beneficiaries in terms of traffic but with that comes additional attention. One of those sites is ExtraTorrent, an index that has moved up the rankings in recent years to become a torrent scene front runner. Last year the site took the #4 position overall and with an impressive Alexa rank of 356, now sits at #3. But despite the achievements, progress has now temporarily ground to a halt. On January 10 the site went down unexpectedly, with an all-too-familiar announcement delivered shortly after. “Extratorrent is under DDoS attack by hackers right now. Please, keep your patience. We’ll try to fix the issues. We’ll be back shortly!” the site announced on Twitter. Indeed, that very same day the site did return but the comeback was brief, with the admins reporting “issues” getting the index functioning again. Early Monday the site’s operators announced that while server problems could continue, everything was on course to be fixed before January 13. But with less than a day to go, attacks against the site persist. “ExtraTorrent still is under DDoS attack. It’s very powerful DDoS attack,” the site reported a few minutes ago. “Our hosting provider tries to solve the issues. We hope to back soon!” At the time of writing ExtraTorrent is available in some regions intermittently. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.    | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pirate Bay’s Mystery AES Code Finally Decrypted Posted: 12 Jan 2015 02:07 AM PST
Instead of its traditional homepage it waved a pirate flag alongside some mysterious hints. The most intriguing part was the aes.png image at the bottom which displayed an encrypted message. Was this secret message pointing to a pirate treasure hidden in the deep web? Did it hold the location of crucial backups that TPB needed to restore the site, or the code of Pirate Bay’s unreleased P2P browser?  As time went on the TPB started to add more hints to the site’s source, hoping that someone would solve the mystery. These pointers eventually led to the answer, first uncovered by Reddit user “dafky2000.” “By analyzing the page source code I could see some irrelevant HTML tags that had no effect. In particular, ‘key lowercase’ with the text enclosed ‘WeAreTPB’, which was not in fact lowercase. The encryption technology was the name of the image itself – ‘aes.png’ – AES,” dafky2000 tells TF. After guessing a few different password hashing algorithms he finally landed on the right one, SHA256. That revealed part of the answer and after a few hours of sleep dafky2000 was able to uncover the entire message. “I did have some trouble – Initially, I was only decrypting half the URL so I knew I was on the right track. Took a break at 2am, but got some sleep to clear my head and finished it off in the morning. I love a challenge and that hit the spot.” As it turns out, Pirate Bay’s message was little more than a URL of a YouTube video. No secret messages crucial to the site’s return, but a compilation of The Terminator’s famous line “I’ll be back.” Like most people dafky2000 had hoped for something more. Especially because another hint that was added recently “pipe vi Makefile” suggests that there’s something TPB wants people to build. “I was trying to solve the ‘pipe vi Makefile’ mystery so I could build whatever program the Makefile would make. Decryption seemed like the stepping stone to that goal. I was mildly disappointed I couldn’t build something but I think there might be more to that,” dafky2000 tells us. Those who want to replicate the results can use the following bash code dafky2000 provided.
The question now is whether The Pirate Bay will indeed make a glorious return as Arnold Schwarzenegger suggests? Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 01/12/15 Posted: 12 Jan 2015 12:02 AM PST
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies 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, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| U.S. ‘Strikes’ Scheme Fails to Impact Piracy Landscape Posted: 11 Jan 2015 10:42 AM PST
The idea is simple. Rightsholders monitor their works being exchanged on file-sharing networks, capture IP addresses of alleged infringers, and send complaints to those individuals’ ISPs. These notices are then forwarded to inform customers of their errant behavior. There can be little doubt that this option is preferable to suing users en masse, but is the approach effective? Thanks to MPAA documents sent to the studios and obtained by TorrentFreak, we now have a clearer idea of whether the movie business itself thinks that “strikes” programs work – and more besides. One document, titled ‘Notice & Graduated Response Programs’ begins by stating the primary aim of the programs: “Reduce P2P piracy while educating consumers about, and directing them to, legal content.” Also confirmed is the MPAA’s desire to implement graduated response schemes with mitigation measures and awareness campaigns attached, the U.S. “Copyright Alerts System” (CAS) for example. CAS mitigation measures haven’t proven to be particularly aggressive thus far but plenty of users have received notices. Around 1.3 million notices were sent in the first 10 months of operations. By November last year, Comcast alone had sent one million warnings. But does the Copyright Alerts System work? While it’s clear that the studios believe these schemes are part of the answer, the MPAA is pragmatic about the CAS behind closed doors, largely since it believes efforts thus far are just the beginning. The U.S. system is “not yet at scale” or operating with “enough education support” according to the MPAA. As a result the CAS has not made an “impact on the overall [piracy] landscape.” That said, the MPAA does claim some successes among those receiving notices. “US program – with escalating remedial measures – [is] reasonably effective in decreasing P2P piracy by those actually receiving notices/alerts,” one summary reads. However, the claim that some notice recipients mend their ways after receiving a warning (the rate of re-offending is actually quite high) is somewhat contradicted by another statement later in the same document. “No current information as to the behavior of users who appear to stop P2P infringement – do not know whether [they are] migrating to other pirate systems or to lawful services,” the statement reads. Nevertheless, the MPAA appears keen to expand the program to a point where impact is more meaningful. This will require cooperation with ISPs, both on volumes and mitigation measures. Expansion, tougher punishments “Attainability as to existing programs boils down to whether ISPs will agree (a) to expand scale to levels that might impact overall P2P piracy, and (b) to enhance remedial measures so as to improve efficacy,” the MPAA writes. Plans to double up on the number of warnings being sent have already been revealed but whether ISPs will be keen to further punish customers remains to be seen. Still, the MPAA’s graduated response “secondary objective” might help them decide. “Build and leverage relationships with ISPs; acknowledgement by ISPs of some responsibility for infringement through their systems; gain and/or strengthen government and other influential support for ISP accountability,” the objective reads. Strikes systems worked elsewhere, right? Perhaps surprisingly the MPAA has pushed ahead with CAS in the United States despite knowing that similar schemes have produced lukewarm results elsewhere. “Programs in France and South Korea (both mandated/managed by government) – and available in New Zealand and Ireland” have had a “limited impact” according to the MPAA. And the notice-and-notice scheme just launched in Canada and the UK’s upcoming VCAP warning system probably won’t produce nice surprises either. The MPAA believes that both are “likely” to prove less effective than programs with mitigation measures, such as the United States’. CAS. The future For the coming year it seems likely that while the MPAA will try to expand its current notice programs by volume, it will not attempt to introduce similar schemes elsewhere. Will users flood to legitimate services though? The MPAA doesn’t know today and won’t know anytime soon but in any event that desired effect will probably require much more investment. “Should see reasonable economies of scale…but to scale to level that will impact overall P2P piracy will likely require substantial additional resources,” the movie group says. “May not have reliable data about impact for 1-2 years.” Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and anonymous VPN services.   | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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