Monthly Archives: July 2010

Finnish ISPs to Warn Pirating Customers

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Following in the footsteps of the UK, Finland is preparing a new piece of legislation that will make it mandatory for Internet providers to warn customers who download music and movies without consent from copyright holders. The proposal is meant to cut down piracy in Finland but both pro and anti-piracy outfits have their doubts abouts its potential effectiveness.

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Finland is known as one of the most forward thinking countries when it comes to the Internet. Earlier this year Finland made a broadband connection a fundamental right of its citizens where every Fin has the right to at least a 1Mbps Internet connection.

In common with many other countries around the world, Finland also has to deal with an active pro-copyright lobby that wants the local Government to crack down on widespread Internet piracy. According to Elisa and Sonera, two of the country’s largest ISPs, the total number of file-sharers in Finland lies well above 50 percent.

To deal with this piracy problem the Finnish Government has now drafted new legislation that would require Internet providers to send warning letters to those who are suspected of illicit downloading. In this scenario, ISPs would be notified of possible infringements by investigation outfits hired by the entertainment industries.

The legislation is similar to that of other countries in Europe, such as the UK and France. The only difference is that the warning letters in Finland will have no consequences at all. They merely serve as an educational message, or a threat, depending on how one interprets the letters.

Because of this lack of enforcement power the local anti-piracy outfit is not too excited about the Government’s plans.

“The problem is that there are no repercussions with this model. A person could get ten letters about illegally sharing material online, and that’s it. This model is ineffective in our opinion,” said Antti Kotilainen, the director of the Anti-piracy Centre.

Finnish Pirate Party chairman Pasi Palmulehto, who generally disagrees with his counterpart at the Anti-piracy Centre, doesn’t think much of the proposal either, but for different reasons.

“This whole warning letter proposal is a clear sign of how far our government is on copyright organizations’ leash. The proposed law itself has no function at all. One can receive 50 warning letters without any consequences,” Pasi Palmulehto told us.

According to The Pirate Party chairman the letters would violate the privacy of Internet users as it encourages private organizations to spy on Internet subscribers. Besides that, the Pirate Party sees the proposal as a waste of money where, ironically, the entertainment industry will cut into their own profits since they have to pay the companies that will have to spy on Internet users.

“Most likely the warning letters themselves will have no effect on most Internet users, but those who actually get scared will probably start using secure and proxy/vpn connections,” Pasi Palmulehto said. According to the Pirate Party chairman there is only one way to deal with Internet piracy.

“There is no need for alternatives to the warning letter process. It is a complete fail and the public is better off without it. The only real alternative is also a long term improvement and that is to legalize non-profit file-sharing,” he said.

Despite the criticism from opposing sides, the proposal will be voted on in the Finnish Parliament in the near future. If it passes it could be signed into law before the and of the year.

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Pirate Party Offers Servers and Hosting To Wikileaks

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This week Wikileaks released more than 90,000 government documents related to the war in Afghanistan. When added to the perceived damage caused by its earlier leaking of the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, Wikileaks is now undoubtedly a serious target for U.S. authorities. After becoming The Pirate Bay’s ISP, The Pirate Party now says that if needed, they will supply servers and hosting to Wikileaks.

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After giving The New York Times, The Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel an early viewing, this week WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of confidential U.S. military documents.

Since then there have been thousands of follow up stories which continue today, as people pick through the information on offer and try to work out what it means for authorities around the world and especially the U.S. Government.

While some are trying to play down the implications for the ongoing war in Afghanistan, Wikileaks chief Julian Assange has been more forceful and has suggested that some of the documents show evidence of war crimes carried out by the U.S. military.

When added to the outrage caused by the recent ‘Collateral Murder‘ video, Wikileaks is developing quite a problem for itself. Yesterday Assange revealed that he had learned that there had been discussions to charge him “as a co-conspirator to espionage.”

Although it appears those discussions were later dropped, Assange still believes that he could be forcefully detained by the U.S. as a witness in the prosecution of intelligence analyst and video-leaker, Bradley Manning. But while concerns persist over Assange’s personal position, some are already considering the implications for the Wikileaks site itself.

“It would not surprise me at all if Sweden is shortly subjected to American pressure to shut down Wikileaks,” says Anna Troberg of the Swedish Pirate Party. “They have acted similarly in terms of The Pirate Bay, and given that Wikileaks’ activities strikes at the very heart of American power, it’s probably just a matter of time before they act.”

“Now is the moment of truth for our Swedish politicians. Will they have enough backbone to stand up on Wikileaks and democracy, or will they give way to the U.S. and go after PRQ and Wikileaks?”

PRQ is the Sweden-based company run by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij of Pirate Bay fame that currently provides hosting to Wikileaks. Although absolutely no stranger to coming under pressure over the sites they host, should PRQ become vulnerable, Wikileaks now have a backup offer on the table.

Never an entity to shy away from the free flow of information, no matter where it lies or whoever might claim ownership of it, the Swedish Pirate Party recently announced that it would become bandwidth supplier to The Pirate Bay. It now says that if the going gets too rough for Wikileaks and PRQ, they will offer the whistleblower site both servers and hosting too.

“The Pirate Party will under no circumstances give in to pressure,” says Troberg. “We now help democracy activists in Iran, including communication via anonymous servers. We provide bandwidth to our greatest political opinion leaders, The Pirate Bay. If Wikileaks is attacked again, we will immediately offer them both server space and bandwidth.”

“The Pirate Party believes in democracy and we are not afraid to stand up for it.”

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uMap: Show Your uTorrent Peers in Google Maps

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uMap is a new App that allows uTorrent users to display all the peers they are connected to on Google Maps. While the App provides a good visualization of global BitTorrent swarms, it also demonstrates that anonymity is hard to find for the regular torrenter.

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In order for BitTorrent to work, clients need IP-addresses of people who are sharing the same files. Aside from being linked to a customer account at an ISP, IP-addresses also provide data on the geographical location of its users.

Although not always 100% accurate, IP-addresses can be linked to the physical location of users, or at least to the city they’re in. Quite a few BitTorrent users are probably already aware of this since most BitTorrent clients list the countries fellow downloaders come from.

One of the latest additions to uTorrent’s App directory takes location awareness a step further. Named uMap, the application displays all your peers on a Google Map, with the option to zoom into the street level. With uMap you can literally check where your peers live.

The App has several ways to display the data. File-sharers can be viewed by the BitTorrent client they use, the country they come from or the swarm they’re currently participating in. uMap was added to the App directory and can now be installed in the latest Griffin release of uTorrent.

uMaps in action

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We’ve tried the App, and although it’s not really that useful, it is interesting to see the huge differences between various torrents and the sites one downloads from. On most public torrents uTorrent and Vuze were the dominant clients, but on a private tracker quite a few seedboxes showed up, some packed together near a big datacenter.

For some novice users uMap might be an eye-opener, since it shows that BitTorrent transfers are far from anonymous. Those who want to hide their real location from other BitTorrent users might want to consider renting a seedbox or signing up for an account at specialized privacy services such as BTGuard and TorrentPrivacy.

Zooming in

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BitTorrent Releasers Slice The Top Off Movie Piracy Pyramid

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Online movie piracy has largely enjoyed a fairly predictable structure during the last decade. New releases have generally hit the Internet on high-security ‘topsites’ first and then trickled down to become widely available on peer-to-peer networks. We now takes a look at a new wave of release groups who operate with a fresh and BitTorrent-powered philosophy.

In a nutshell, this is how online movie piracy has worked in recent times. Using their connections, so-called ‘Scene’ release groups – who inhabit secretive and highly exclusive servers, off limits to regular Internet users – obtain copies of freshly released movies. On their ‘topsites’ they share material with fairly close contacts for their own entertainment, usually along with strict instructions not to leak material to the outside world.

By now, everyone knows that the ‘Scene’ is just as leaky as the movie distribution model Hollywood would also like to protect, and within minutes their releases have begun to appear on peer-to-peer networks, especially BitTorrent. For those in the ‘Scene’ this is generally a huge disappointment. For millions of regular file-sharers, it’s a dream come true.

However, increasingly over the last few years, big movie releases have completely bypassed the usual routes to the Internet. In 2005, Star Wars Episode III appeared on the Internet to a fairly surprised ‘Scene’, which led to numerous groups ‘rebranding’ the release as their own, a ‘crime’ usually reserved for those lower down the pecking order.

And who can forget Wolverine? The leak of this unfinished ‘Workprint’ copy generated hundreds of mainstream news headlines. Did it come from the ‘Scene’? Absolutely not. It was leaked straight to the general Internet, bypassing the well-worn structure of the so-called ‘piracy pyramid’ altogether.

This phenomenon has been increasing rapidly, with some normally staunchly pro-Scene news outlets having to admit that times are changing. VCDQuality, a site which for years has been dedicated to reporting how quickly the ‘Scene’ releases movies onto the Internet, recently announced a significant change. They would now begin reporting when the new breed of releasers are first to introduce new movies to the Internet.

After all this time, the dedicated P2P release groups had finally been acknowledged. As can be seen here, their achievement list is growing with big movies and big releases. From Cams, through Telesyncs to DVD Screeners, it seems no format is escaping attention.

Following on from VCDQuality’s decision, a couple of weeks ago P2PElite was quietly launched. Its admin, KoOlWaReZ, told us that the site was designed and created to provide a home, profile and a central location for P2P release groups to get feedback, ratings, and interaction with the public on their releases.

While the site is still in development, the suggestion that release groups could interact with their audience is a major departure from the hide-away attitude demonstrated by ‘Scene’ groups.

Nevertheless, groups are indeed supporting the project. Among others, PrisM, iMAGiNE, Rx, FLAWL3SS, KiNGDOM, Noir, MAGNET and 420Demons (soon to be known as THC) are participating, names which will be familiar to huge numbers of BitTorrent users.

For Scene groups, leaks to BitTorrent and the wider Internet are the last thing they want. For the new wave of P2P release groups such as the above, this is the main aim.

We have managed to interview some Scene release group members before, so when we had the opportunity to speak with some straight-to-BitTorrent releasers, we jumped at the chance.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at the P2P release scene a little closer and chat with a couple of BitTorrent release groups to see what makes them tick.

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