Monthly Archives: July 2010

Police Keep Their Word, Shut Down File-Sharing Sites

Posted on by

Following high level talks with the IFPI and very public declarations on national TV, it recently became clear that Bulgarian authorities would start taking down torrent sites and other file-sharing services. This week the Ministry of Affairs has been busy targeting what it describes as a “criminal network” of file-hosting services which allegedly generated more than $3 million.

In late April a memorandum was signed by Bularia’s Interior Ministry and the IFPI Image is Loading....which effectively declared war on music piracy in the country.

Within days of this announcement Yavor Kolev, the head of Bulgaria’s Computer Crimes Department, stated on national TV that he would begin taking tough action against BitTorrent sites and other file-sharing locations, especially those that profit from their activities.

“We will shut down Zamunda and Arena BG and their servers that supply pirated movies and music and take money from their users via premium SMS,” Kolev told the media. However, neither site takes money from BitTorrent users in this way, instead generating income from advertising. This week it became clear that other sites would be targeted first.

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it has just carried out “the largest ever operation against Internet piracy in Bulgaria”.

Four file-sharing sites were targeted – nanoset.net (which advertised new releases via Twitter), rapidadd.com, 4storing.com and afasta.com. They are accused of distributing music, movies, books and software without the permission of copyright holders and as of today, all four remain down.

After several months of investigations, on a judge’s authorization and under the supervision of the Deputy District Prosecutor, on Thursday authorities moved against the sites. It is being claimed that they were being operated by “an organized crime group” which employed “sophisticated mechanisms for concealing the location of their servers”.

Nevertheless, as can be seen from the photos below and the video here, servers -18 in all containing a claimed 120TB – were found. Computer equipment and documents were also seized from the office of a 37 year-old man who is claimed to be the organizer behind the “criminal activity”. He was arrested.

Seized Hardware

Image is Loading....

More Seized Hardware

Image is Loading....

The Ministry goes on to state the operators of the websites had been profiting from the distribution of copyright content to the tune of $3.34 million by charging users to access material via premium SMS services. One TorrentFreak reader familiar with situation noted that SMS providers in Bulgaria can take as much as 40-50% of each SMS payment, so the amount allegedly generated should be treated with caution.

While the four busted sites did accept SMS payments, as with many one click hosters, premium accounts with greater features were available for a price. The sites also gave users the ability to use their facilities for free.

Although the head of Bulgaria’s Computer Crimes Department had threatened action against Zamunda and Arena BG “and their servers that supply pirated movies and music and take money from their users via premium SMS”, both torrent sites remain operational today. However, research on the backgrounds of two of the raided sites, 4Storing and Afasta, appears to show some earlier links to ArenaBG although the exact nature of these connections remain unclear.

Read

U.S. Copyright Group ‘Steal’ Competitor’s Website

Posted on by

The U.S. Copyright Group (USCG) has been all over the news in recent months. The lawyer group sued thousands of BitTorrent users who allegedly file-shared motion pictures belonging to their clients, including the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker. However, it turns out that USCG are not copyright purists either, as they have blatantly copied the website of a competitor without permission.

During May this year the makers of The Hurt Locker filed a complaint against the first 5,000 ‘John Does’. Helped by the U.S. Copyright Group (USCG), the film makers are requesting the personal details of individuals behind the IP-addresses that allegedly shared the film on BitTorrent.

With these personal details in hand, USCG is planning to send out a batch of settlement requests asking the alleged file-sharers to pay amounts up to $2,500, or risk a full trial and a heftier fine instead. In recent months USCG has already sent out similar ‘speculative invoices’ to downloaders of other films, including the indie movie Far Cry.

It’s needless to say that the administrative process to handle thousands of settlements will involve quite a bit of work. To make this easier for themselves and the alleged downloaders, USCG recently put up a settlement website where visitors to their main website Copyrightsettlements.info are redirected to.

By itself the mere existence of this settlement portal wouldn’t really be newsworthy, but this changed when we realized that they had copied it from a competitor.

Six weeks ago one of our reader alerted us that USCG was setting up a new website to deal with the settlements. Instead of coding the site themselves, they had simply copied the code (including the copyright statement) and images from a company in the same line of work. The images below show how both sites looked at the time.

Copied website (large)

Image is Loading....Source (large)

Image is Loading....

Because the USCG site was hosted on a force.com subdomain, we weren’t able to verify the legitimacy of this site to find out if there was indeed a direct connection to USCG. To be honest, we simply couldn’t believe that USCG would be stupid enough to blatantly rip-off a website like this, so we assumed that someone had tried to pull off a prank.

A month after the email, however, the same site popped up again when we tried to access the website of USCG. Although the original layout was stripped down significantly over the past weeks, the website still uses code and images from the Copyright Enforcement Group.

Initially, USCG even listed their competitor’s phone number on their site, but they were wise enough to remove this and other texts that refer to the Copyright Enforcement Group. That said, there is no doubt that USCG’s website is ‘stolen’.

Both the source code and the copied image names clearly reveal that the code was blatantly copied from their competitors. Armed with this knowledge we decided to contact the victims of this apparent violation to ask if they had perhaps authorized this use. The answer we got was clear.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are not associated with the US Copyright Group and they are not authorized to use Copyright Enforcement Group materials,” a representative of the Copyright Enforcement Group told us in a response.

Another representative told the reader who tipped us off that the US Copyright Group and Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver will be receiving a cease and desist from Copyright Enforcement Group.

Of course, we’ve seen this type of behavior before. The UK’s ACS:Law, also writing to thousands of file-sharers demanding cash payments for alleged infringements, aren’t whiter than whiter either. They took sections of several news articles and tried, unsuccessfully, to pass them off as their own content on their company website.

So there we have it once again. An outfit that targets copyright infringers is actively infringing copyright themselves. They are so incompetent and probably blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes, that they can’t even put a website together without breaking the law themselves – copyright law.

Read

uTorrent Web Now on iPad and Android

Posted on by

After adding support for the iPhone last month, BitTorrent Inc. has now made the remote access ‘Web’ feature of its uTorrent Falcon client compatible with the iPad and Android devices. uTorrent users can now remotely control their downloads from wherever they are on their favorite mobile device.

Image is Loading....

This year BitTorrent Inc. has been very active with the development of uTorrent. The company pushed out two experimental clients, codenamed Falcon and Griffin, which are bundled in the latest uTorrent 3.0 alpha release.

Both projects add several new features to uTorrent. The Griffin branch of uTorrent adds Apps for uTorrent support, allowing users to easily install extensions and add custom features. The Falcon project enables users to stream torrent video files and access their client remotely through a secure web-interface.

With uTorrent ‘Web’, users can access torrents running on their PC from anywhere in the world, on any computer they have access to. Torrents can be added, paused and removed using an interface with a look and feel identical to that of the uTorrent application.

Initially, uTorrent ‘Web’ was only available on standard PC browsers, but last month iPhone support was added. Now, after many requests from uTorrent users, the remote control feature is now compatible with the iPad and Android devices.

“Since launching µTorrent Web for iPhone, users have been clamoring for something similar on other devices,” BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management Simon Morris announced. “So, today we are very excited to announce support for the iPad and Android platform – including the Nexus One and Google Ion devices. Now you can control torrents via your web browser on a PC, iPhone, iPad and Android.”

The response from users of the remote control feature has been quite positive thus far, but there’s also a group of people who are reluctant to try the service because of privacy concerns. The ‘agreement’ between the MPAA and BitTorrent Inc. is still not forgotten by everyone, even though that only applied to BitTorrent Inc’s now defunct search engine. Morris, however, ensures that users’ privacy is in good hands with BitTorrent Inc.

“Just like with µTorrent Web for iPhone, we continue to take users’ privacy very seriously – all your private data is encrypted from the moment it leaves your browser right to the client on the other end. So, as before, users can rest assured that the private details of their µTorrent usage are never exposed to BitTorrent Inc. or any third parties,” he says.

In order to use the web interface, users will first have to download and install the latest Falcon release or uTorrent 3.0 alpha. In the client users can set a username and password that they can use to access their torrents remotely. After an encryption swipe and logging in, users will see the mobile compatible interface that gives them all the controls they are familiar with in their regular PC client.

Read