TorrentFreak Email Update |
- Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay
- Torrent-less Pirate Bay Sees Massive Drop in Bandwith
- Megaupload Shutdown Boosted TV and VOD Services
| Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay Posted: 09 Mar 2012 03:17 AM PST
The raid eventually led to the conviction of four people connected to The Pirate Bay, but the site itself remained online. Today, the Pirate Bay team has informed TorrentFreak that a second raid is being prepared by the Swedish authorities. The site’s operators, who are well-connected in multiple ways, learned that a team of Swedish investigators is gearing up to move against the site in the future. The suspicions were also made public by The Pirate Bay a few minutes ago. “The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010. Information has been leaked to us every now and then by multiple sources, almost on a regular basis. It’s an interesting read,” the Pirate Bay crew notes. “We can certainly understand why WikiLeaks wished to be hosted in Sweden, since so much data leaks there. The reason that we get the leaks is usually that the whistleblowers do not agree with what is going on. Something that the governments should have in mind – even your own people do not agree.” The Pirate Bay team confirmed to TorrentFreak that the announcement is no prank. The authorities have obtained warrants to snoop around in sensitive places and two known anti-piracy prosecutors, Frederick Ingblad and Henrik Rasmusson, are said to be involved. Employing a little psychological warfare aimed at putting the investigators off-balance, the Pirate Bay team has chosen to make the news public to make the authorities aware that they are not the only ones being watched. According to The Pirate Bay team they aren’t doing anything illegal, but nonetheless they noticed that the investigation intensified after the site’s recent move to a .SE domain. “Since our recent move to a .SE domain the investigation has been cranked up a notch. We think that the investigation is interesting considering nothing that TPB does is illegal,” they say. “Rather we find it interesting that a country like Sweden is being so abused by lobbyists and that this can be kept up. They’re using scare tactics, putting pressure on the wrong people, like providers and users. All out of fear from the big country in the west, and with an admiration for their big fancy wallets.” Behind the scenes The Pirate Bay team is working hard to ensure that the site will remain online in the event that servers, domain names and Internet routes are cut off. In this regard The Pirate Bay has learned a valuable lesson from its former operators. Those who are aware of the site's history know that without a few essential keystrokes in May 2006, The Pirate Bay may not have been here today. When Pirate Bay founder TiAMO heard that something was amiss, he decided to make a full backup of the site before heading off to the datacenter, where he was greeted by dozens of police officers. Footage from the 2006 Pirate Bay raid TiAMO’s decision to start a backup of the site is probably the most pivotal moment in the site's history. Because of this backup the Pirate Bay team were able to resurrect the site within three days. If there hadn't have been a recent backup, things may have turned out quite differently. It was a close call at the time, and a defining moment in the history of the site. The determination to get the site back online as soon as possible set the defiant tone for the years that followed. Today, the site prides itself in being the most resilient torrent site around. In recent years The Pirate Bay has implemented a variety of changes to guarantee that the site remains online. It added several backup domains, placed servers all over the world, and removed resource intensive processes. Earlier this week The Pirate Bay took another important step by removing .torrent files altogether to become a “magnet link” site. As a result, the entire site can now be reduced to a few hundred megabytes, small enough to fit on the tiniest thumb drive. For the police, this makes a successful Pirate Bay raid almost impossible. While they can take steps to put the site out of business briefly, it’s inevitable that it will re-appear in a matter of hours, or days. Or to use the words of the Pirate Bay team. “We’re staying put where we are. We’re going no-where. But we have a message to hollywood, the investigators and the prosecutors: LOL.” Source: Leaked: Police Plan to Raid The Pirate Bay
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| Torrent-less Pirate Bay Sees Massive Drop in Bandwith Posted: 08 Mar 2012 11:04 AM PST
This means that instead of downloading the .torrent files directly from a central server, they will be downloaded from other BitTorrent users instead. One of the consequences of this move is that The Pirate Bay has seen a massive drop in bandwidth consumption. The size of the impact became clear today when the site’s operators informed TorrentFreak that bandwidth usage has dropped by nearly a third. “We now use 30 percent less bandwidth, but the number of visitors to the site remains the same,” we were told. The drop is even more impressive, approximately 60 percent, when the Pirate Bay’s RSS-feed is excluded. Of all bandwidth generated by the popular file-sharing site today nearly half comes from the RSS feed. But there are not only upsides to a torrent-less Pirate Bay. Large groups of users have experienced problems when trying to overcome the minor annoyances that magnets bring with them. One of the most heard complaints is that it’s impossible to select individual files before starting a download. This can be problematic when people need only one single file from a huge archive. When downloading a .torrent people can select the file in question in a window before starting the download, but with magnets they can’t (it it supported by BitComet). A possible fix for this can be to keep the detail window open until the full torrent has been downloaded. Obviously, these are issues for BitTorrent client developers and not The Pirate Bay. Following The Pirate Bay’s switch to magnets the uTorrent development team have already addressed one magnet-related bug, one that made it impossible to resume or reseed downloads when a magnet was re-added to the download queue. Despite the issues mentioned above the transition appears to have gone smoothly. For The Pirate Bay the switch to magnets was necessary, as it makes the site more resistant to being shut down. It’s easier to move around and takes only a fraction of the resources that were previously needed. And as an added bonus it reduces the bandwidth bills. Source: Torrent-less Pirate Bay Sees Massive Drop in Bandwith
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| Megaupload Shutdown Boosted TV and VOD Services Posted: 08 Mar 2012 05:52 AM PST
But by January 19th it was all over. Megaupload and all its sister companies were closed down in now-infamous raids and its French users – between them viewing nearly 97.5 million videos per month – had to make alternative arrangements. According to a new report by Hadopi, the French agency tasked with administering the country’s 3 strikes anti-piracy strategy, many of them turned to authorized services. Hadopi say they used data compiled by Médiamétrie/ Netratings on approximately 50 authorized video platforms. Stats were gathered from 22 free sites (excluding YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo), 12 TV ‘catch-up’ services, 12 premium VOD services and 4 other aggregators/portals. Hadopi says the data, which was collected after Megaupload’s shutdown date of January 19th and ran to the end of the month, shows that overall the VOD, catchup TV and aggregator platforms enjoyed a significant 25.7% growth when compared to the weeks immediately prior to the site’s closure. When broken down the aggregators and portals enjoyed the biggest uplift in visitors of some 85%, premium VOD second with 35%, followed by TV catchup services with a 25% increase. The free streaming sites, on the other hand, suffered a 20% reduction in visitors during the same period. According to reports by Numerama, last month French media outfit Canal + reported a 20% rise in sales on their VOD platform since the closure of Megaupload, with national TV channel TF1 reporting a 40% boost. However, increases in traffic were not simply restricted to authorized content outlets. As already noted here on TorrentFreak, in the wake of the Megaupload closure many of the site’s competitors such as Rapidshare, Uploaded.to, Depositfiles and Hotfile, also enjoyed surges in traffic.  But as can be seen from the updated traffic graph above, while the first three hosters appear to have kept a decent proportion of the traffic initially gained, Hotfile’s traffic is already back to pre-January 19th levels. It will be very interesting to see if the short-term fortunes of the sites surveyed by Médiamétrie will show a similar trend to that demonstrated by Hotfile once the panic has subsided, or if they will maintain their new levels. To get a better idea of the longer term consumer response to the Mega shutdown we will have to wait and see what figures Médiamétrie return for February, March and April. The closure of Mega on January 19th will have undoubtedly prompted a knee jerk reaction by users and flight to other services of all different shapes and sizes, but whether they stay put or move again remains to be seen. According to the indictment against Megaupload there will now be at least hundreds of millions of dollars to be shared among ‘legitimate’ companies now Kim Dotcom’s company has gone. Whether the coffers of authorized video providers will benefit in line with the traffic increases suggested above is the really big question, and one yet to be answered. Source: Megaupload Shutdown Boosted TV and VOD Services
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In the spring of 2006 a team of 65 Swedish police personnel entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The officers were tasked with 
Last week The Pirate Bay 
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