TorrentFreak Email Update

Anti-Mafia Unit Raids Large Torrent Sites, Arrests 17-Year-Old Admin
uTorrent & BitTorrent Surge to 150 Million Monthly Users
The Pirate Bay Shows Futility of Domain and DNS Blocks

Anti-Mafia Unit Raids Large Torrent Sites, Arrests 17-Year-Old Admin

Posted: 10 Jan 2012 04:46 AM PST

As part of a ongoing campaign to crack down on Internet-based piracy, Bulgaria’s organized crime unit targeted two of the country’s largest BitTorrent trackers at the weekend.

Officers from the National Directorate for Combating Organized Crime said they raided a total of three locations in the western city of Pernik, the central northern city of Gabrovo and the capital Sofia. The aim: stop the illegal distribution of music and movies.

Although not directly named in yesterday’s Interior Ministry announcement, the action was targeted at P2PBG and Elit-BG, sites with combined userbases of at least 750,000 members.

P2PBG alone had more than 600K members but the exact userbase of Elit-Bg is unclear since a database issue last year caused them to ‘lose’ 200K members. Nevertheless, their popularity placed them in the country’s top 5 most popular torrent sites.

Picture of raids from bTV

raids

The authorities say that they have arrested two individuals, allegedly the sites’ owners. According to the Interior Ministry, one of them is “a minor”. TorrentFreak is informed that he is a teenager, just 17-years-old.

While computer equipment and other hardware is said to have been seized, that does not appear to include site hardware. Both sites remain up on the same host located outside the country in Germany. Access to their trackers, however, has been disabled.

A notice on P2PBG declares: “Access to the torrent section is disabled for all users. Please save your angry comments.”

The Interior Ministry described the raids as “another successful operation” in the Ministry of Culture’s overall plan to crack down on copyright infringement.

Source: Anti-Mafia Unit Raids Large Torrent Sites, Arrests 17-Year-Old Admin

uTorrent & BitTorrent Surge to 150 Million Monthly Users

Posted: 09 Jan 2012 11:00 AM PST

With millions of people using BitTorrent every day, the protocol has been the leading P2P technology from more than half a decade.

Despite massive competition from cyberlockers, BitTorrent continues to expand year after year, and not just by a little. Today, BitTorrent Inc. announced that their two flagship clients increased their user base by 50 percent, to more than 150 million active users a month.

Most growth can be attributed to uTorrent, which more than quadrupled its number of monthly users in the last three years. The ‘tiny’ BitTorrent client went from 28 million monthly users in December 2008 to 132 million last month.

"This marks an amazing milestone for our company and we want to thank our loyal users and partners for their support. Our protocol and software clients have become some of the most pervasive pieces of technology in Internet history," says BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker.

"We look forward to another exciting year of growth and we continue expanding our product lines to meet the needs of consumers creating and consuming high-quality personal media files on a broad range of consumer electronics devices," he adds.

The last comment ties in to a slew of other announcements released by BitTorrent today. The company is currently showcasing several “BitTorrent Certified” devices at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics tradeshow in Las Vegas. Through these partnerships BitTorrent hopes to add an extra revenue stream, and widen its user base beyond the traditional computer.

Aside from showing off BitTorrent-enabled routers, TVs and network storage devices, BitTorrent will also launch the world’s first certified set-top box developed by the Slovakian company Antik. The set-top-box allows users to search, download and play torrent files directly on their TV.

The advantage of the BitTorrent Certified ecosystem is that it simplifies the downloading process for less tech-savvy people. Right now, many people drop out after installing a BitTorrent client because they find it too complicated to download and play content.

Whether these devices will be a success is yet to be seen, but there is certainly a large enough user base to tap into.

Based on the 150 million active monthly users BitTorrent Inc. reports for their clients, the total number of monthly BitTorrent users can be estimated at more than a quarter billion. And despite these already dazzling numbers, there is still plenty of room for growth.

Source: uTorrent & BitTorrent Surge to 150 Million Monthly Users

The Pirate Bay Shows Futility of Domain and DNS Blocks

Posted: 09 Jan 2012 05:41 AM PST

In May 2011, the Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Centre (CIAPC) and the Finnish branch of the music industry group IFPI filed a lawsuit the District Court of Helsinki.

The groups demanded that local ISP Elisa should be forced to protect the copyrights of their members by stopping their subscribers accessing The Pirate Bay. Initially Elisa refused, described the blocking demands as "unreasonable", but a subsequent court order left them with no choice.

On October 26th 2011, the District Court of Helsinki ordered Elisa to block a range of domains and IP addresses associated with The Pirate Bay. Although Elisa has contested the decision by filing with the Helsinki Court of Appeal, in the meantime they have to comply.

Today, Elisa has confirmed it has begun blocking the domains and IP addresses listed below:

thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.org, depiraatbaai.be, www.depiraatbaai.be, piratebay.am, www.piratebay.am, piratebay.net, www.piratebay.net, www.piratebay.no, piratebay.no, piratebay.se, www.piratebay.se, suprnova.com, www.suprnova.com, themusicbay.com, www.themusicbay.com, themusicbay.net, www.themusicbay.net, themusicbay.org, www.themusicbay.org, thepiratebay.am,www.thepiratebay.am, www.thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.com, thepiratebay.gl, www.thepiratebay.gl, thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.se, thepiratebay.se, www.piraattilahti.fi, piraattilahti.fi, thepiratepay.org.nyud.net

IP addresses to be blocked:

194.71.107.15
194.71.107.19
194.71.107.18

“During the war between Finland and Russia some Swedes decided to help Finland. They said ‘The Finnish cause is ours’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak, signaling their intention to circumvent the block.

“TPB originates from Sweden, so TPB will see the Finnish cause as its own. Only this time, it’s against the copyright Russians,” he concluded.

And it appears the battle for the ’cause’ has already begun. The last domain in the list certainly piqued our interest and not only because it includes a typo. The nyud.net domain belongs to the peer-to-peer based Coral CDN service which links to IP-addresses all over the world, which is generally a good tool to make blocked sites accessible again.

Ironically enough, the domain in question reveals a very easy way to bypass The Pirate Bay blockade in Finland. Just use one of the alternative domains associated with The Pirate Bay, add nyud.net (e.g. depiraatbaai.be.nyud.net) and the most resilient torrent site becomes accessible again in Finland.

“While this block can temporarily stop the basic filesharer from using The Pirate Bay, we already see a surge of interest in blocking technology, censorship, net neutrality, copyright legislation and court practice in the media,” Joonas Mäkinen of Finland's Pirate Party told TorrentFreak.

“This probably ends up being beneficial to filesharing and shows the blocking attempts to be counter-productive. Side-effects will be that the more blocks there are, the more workarounds people learn. This could severely hinder solving important crimes in the future,” he concludes.

censored Party secretary Harri Kivistö shares these concerns.

“These blocks are nothing. People adapt, as they’ve always done. They learn to use new methods, they discover new websites, they circumvent,” he told TorrentFreak. “Loads of money are thrown into lobbying and legal action and nothing else is accomplished but limitations to civil rights and preliminary structures for a police state.”

Interestingly there is another domain in the list which does not link to The Pirate Bay at all.

Anyone (Elisa customers excluded) clicking piraattilahti.fi will see that the domain is not linked to the world’s most resilient torrent site at all, but digital rights group EFFI – Electronic Frontier Finland.

“The decision from Helsinki Administrative Office for Enforcement was quite surprising considering the decision SABAM v. Scarlet from The Court of Justice of the European Union and the fact that the decision itself is currently under appeal,” Ville Oksanen, lawyer and researcher at Aalto University told TorrentFreak.

“It’s hard to see why the enforcement has to start before the matter is finally resolved – especially considering that the given decision is quite ineffective , e.g. it misses www.thepiratebay.ee and all the different proxy and open DNS-services. Even more ironically, one of blocked the addresses actually is a forward to www.effi.org, which is ‘the Finnish version’ of Electronic Frontier Foundation,” he concludes.

In the last hour we’ve learned that there are even more blocking circumvention options coming soon meaning that this cat and mouse game could go on forever.

Source: The Pirate Bay Shows Futility of Domain and DNS Blocks

The Pirate's Press

Tuesday, 10 January 2012