Category Archives: Evil Next

U.S. Government Starts New Round of ‘Pirate’ Domain Seizures

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US authorities have resumed “Operation In Our Sites” and have seized several domain names associated with copyright infringement or counterfeit related crimes. Among the new targets are two sites that linked to copyrighted films hosted on third party streaming sites such as megavideo.com and veoh.com. Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has yet to officially announce the new operation.

Over the past several months a series of domain name seizures by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made headlines across the Internet.

Under the flag of “Operation In Our Sites” the authorities shut down a dozen file-sharing and streaming sites and many more accused of selling counterfeit goods.

Today ICE continued the operation with a 4th round, and the first one since February this year. Although the authorities are yet to give an official comment on the new seizures, We were able to confirm the following targets:

* Re1ease.net
* Watchnewfilms.com
* Dvdcollectionsale.com
* Dvdscollection.com
* Dvdsetsonline.com
* Newstylerolex.com

The first two domains are accused of copyright-related offenses, but did not host any copyrighted films themselves. Both Re1ease.net and Watchnewfilms.com linked to popular movie streaming sites such as Veoh.com and Megavideo.com. The rest of the domains appear to be connected to sales of counterfeit goods.

The new targets were most likely put forward to ICE by movie industry groups. In April of this year ICE director John Morton admitted that his organization was acting based on “tips from industry representatives,” among others.

The authorities are also aware of the fact that the domain seizures themselves are not really an effective tool. As pointed out before, more than half of the piracy-related domains that were seized by Operation In Our Sites simply continued under a different name.

Morton replied to this critique by emphasizing that the seizures also act as “public education about pirating.”

To quash allegedly copyright infringing sites more effectively U.S. lawmakers introduced the PROTECT IP Act last week. Aside from domain seizures, the new bill will also make it possible to block sites on an ISP level, to censor search engines, and to cut funding of allegedly copyright-infringing websites.

We are closely monitoring developments in Operation in Our Sites 4 and if any additional domains are seized we will update this report accordingly.

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Homeland Security Wants Mozilla to Pull “Domain Seizure” Add-On

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Homeland Security’s ICE unit is not happy with a Firefox add-on that allows the public to circumvent the domains seizures carried out during the past several months. In an attempt to correct this ‘vulnerability’ in their anti-piracy strategy, ICE have asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. Unfortunately for them Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet.

Image is Loading....Last month we were the first to draw attention to a nifty Firefox add-on called “MAFIAA Fire.”

The add-on maintains a list of all the domains that ICE (hence the antidote, ‘fire’) has seized and redirects their users to an alternative domain if the sites in question have set one up. The developers told us that they coded it to demonstrate the futility of the domain seizures, which they find objectionable.

Homeland Security’s ICE unit got wind of the add-on and almost immediately took action to have it taken offline. Although the add-on can be hosted anywhere, they asked Mozilla to remove it from their repository just a few days after it first appeared there.

“Recently the US Department of Homeland Security contacted Mozilla and requested that we remove the Mafiaa Fire add-on,” explained Mozilla General Counsel and Vice President of Business Affairs Harvey Anderson. “The ICE Homeland Security Investigations unit alleged that the add-on circumvented a seizure order DHS had obtained against a number of domain names.”

However, where ICE might have expected a swift take down from Mozilla, the legal and business affairs department of the tech company was not planning to honor the request so easily.

“Our approach is to comply with valid court orders, warrants, and legal mandates, but in this case there was no such court order,” Anderson explains.

According to Anderson complying with the request without any additional information would threaten open Internet principles. So, instead of taking the add-on offline they replied to ICE with a set of 11 well-crafted questions.

Interestingly enough, Mozilla never heard from ICE again.

We can only guess how often U.S. authorities try similar mild censorship requests, but if we look at all the companies and services that kicked out Wikileaks last year we have to assume that it’s not the first time. Only a few dare to stand up to such requests, which is a worrying situation.

“One of the fundamental issues here is under what conditions do intermediaries accede to government requests that have a censorship effect and which may threaten the open Internet,” says Anderson.

“Longterm, the challenge is to find better mechanisms that provide both real due process and transparency without infringing upon developer and user freedoms traditionally associated with the Internet,” he adds.

We got in touch with one of the MAFIAA Fire developers, who told us that ICE never contacted them with a takedown request. And although the add-on would still be available on their own website if Mozilla pulled it, he was happy that they chose to put up a fight.

“Hats off to Mozilla for sticking up to them, at first we weren’t sure if Mozilla would even host it due to its controversial nature, but they truly backed up their open source supporting words with actions,” the developer told us.

Indeed, Mozilla deserves to be applauded here for judging ICE’s request by its content, and not by the envelope in which it was sent.

Meanwhile, the MAFIAA Fire team has published a Chrome version of the add-on today. Both add-ons are Open Source and available on the official website, which also has a mirror here to ensure continuity.

Looks like ICE’s request to Mozilla just backFIREd…

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US Govt. Uses Seized Domains for Anti-Piracy Video

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The U.S. Government is celebrating the importance of intellectual property by educating visitors to the domain names it seized in previous months. These visitors are now redirected to an anti-piracy video instead. The viral video is running on 65 of the seized domains which have now become property of the Government, and shows how illegal downloads can financially ruin innocent workers.

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Over the past several months a series of domain name seizures by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made headlines across the Internet.

Under the flag of “Operation In Our Sites” the authorities shut down a dozen file-sharing and streaming sites, as well as close to 80 sites selling counterfeit goods. On the majority of these domains, the authorities have now decided to run an anti-piracy announcement to honor yesterday’s World Intellectual Property Day.

“To coincide with World Intellectual Property Day, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) has launched a new public service announcement (PSA) that aims to raise awareness of the economic impact of IP theft,” they announced.

The authorities can “use” the domains for this campaign because the previous owners did not file an appeal. This means that the domains have fallen into the hands of the U.S. Government.

“If no petitions or claims are filed, the domain names become property of the U.S. government. Since “Operation In Our Sites” began, 65 domain names have been forfeited using this process. Other domain names are still in the administrative forfeiture process,” the authorities explain.

Interestingly enough, the video that appears on the domains is an anti-piracy campaign, targeted at those who download illegal movies. However, of the 100+ domains that were seized over the past year, only one (torrent-finder.com) was linked by the authorities to illegal movie downloads. But this falls flat, since Torrent-Finder is actually one of the few sites that appealed the seizure of its domain, and thus not showing the video.

Most of the domains that now link to the video have nothing to do with ‘piracy,’ but were selling counterfeit goods. Something entirely different according to the law, but that doesn’t seem to bother the authorities. If we have to take a guess, we’d say the anti-piracy video was probably put up at the MPAA’s request.

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Yahoo! Messenger Censors FilesTube Links

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Censoring the Internet on behalf of the entertainment industries appears to be a growing trend. Talks about Internet blocklists, domain seizures of alleged pirate sites, and Google’s proactive filter of “infringing” searches are just a few examples. Today it appears that Yahoo! has hopped on the bandwagon with its censoring of links to FilesTube, one of the largest media search engines.

Image is Loading....Imagine that you found this great new TV-show “Pioneer One,” which the makers decided to give away for free. You’re actually so excited about it that you want to share it with a friend by pasting them a FilesTube link in Yahoo! Messenger.

Although this might sound like a good idea to some, Yahoo! appears to disagree. Those who try to paste a FilesTube link to their contacts in the Messenger app will notice that it never reaches its destination. The link goes directly into Yahoo’s dark hole and neither end of the conversation is alerted to this “feature”.

For those not familiar with the site, FilesTube is arguably the largest meta-search engine for content hosted on cyberlockers. Founded in 2007, the Polish-operated search engine serves millions of users every day, and this number is on the up.

The big question of course is why Yahoo! Messenger users are prohibited from sending their contacts links to the site. FilesTube is merely a meta-search engine and does not host any content on its servers. It even abides by the U.S. DMCA by honoring takedown requests from copyright holders.

We contacted Yahoo! to try and shed some light on the issue, but since we haven’t heard back yet all we can do at this point is speculate. Theoretically there could be a non-copyright related reason for the blocking, but we have failed to come up with one. On the other hand, in tests where we sent our contacts links to similar sites did not produce the same results, which is odd.

Although not very logical, such a selective censorship attempt would not be entirely new. Just a few months ago Google decided to arbitrarily block a few piracy related keywords from their “instant” and “suggest” features while leaving direct and just as popular alternatives unharmed.

Whatever the reason is for Yahoo! monitoring private conversations and then swallowing FilesTube links, censorship is an up and coming tool that will be used increasingly to protect the interests of the entertainment industries. It complements other indirect but effective anti-piracy strategies, and despite the constitutional issues that may arise, the anti-piracy lobby will not rest before their goals are completed.

Update: Arkadiusz Senko, CEO of Red – Sky, the owner FilesTube got back to us with the following message:

“I was surprised to have adopted information about blocking FilesTube.com by Yahoo Messenger. FilesTube.com is a legal search engine, meets all the legal requirements of both European and American. We are shocked by Yahoo Messenger to censor the Internet, and thus the actions of our users who use FilesTube.com for legal media. We would like to point out that we also have a video section, where the aggregated videos from YouTube or Dailymotion are placed. It seems to us that Yahoo has taken action to block links to competing sites. In such a situation it lefts us nothing but to recommend users to use other instant messengers, respectful of freedom of the Internet. You can find the alternatives for Yahoo Messenger on our new search engine alternative.to.”

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