Category Archives: Trackers

MPAA Takes A Dozen Torrent Sites Offline

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The MPAA has managed to take a dozen torrent sites offline in the United States, with help from Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The 12 torrent sites – which remain anonymous – were pulled offline by their hosting companies following complaints from the two organizations. What effect this ‘massive’ takedown operation will have on the BitTorrent ecosystem is yet to be seen, but thus far there are no reports of ‘missing’ torrent sites.

Image is Loading....The MPAA has been very concerned with the widespread and unauthorized availability of motion picture movies on the Internet, specifically via torrent sites.

Last November it reported some of the largest torrent sites to the US Government, including The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and BTjunkie, calling them piracy havens.

In a follow up to the many accusations, the MPAA has now managed to shutter 12 torrent sites at once, a headline designed to send shockwaves through the BitTorrent community.

The MPAA has teamed up with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN, who have perfected the art of pulling sites offline. In the last two years alone the organization has (temporarily) disabled more than 1000 torrent sites in The Netherlands, and they are now helping the MPAA towards doing the same in the US.

Twelve torrent sites were wiped from the Internet this week, but there is a catch to this ‘unprecedented’ action. As often with BREIN-led takedowns, nobody noticed a thing. If a torrent site of any significance goes offline for an hour or two our email inbox is usually alive with reports from readers. Today, however, we received none.

That doesn’t mean of course that the news isn’t worth reporting on. BREIN issued a press-release earlier today in which they appear very satisfied with what they’ve accomplished, and they assure the public that this isn’t the last time we will hear about such a torrent site massacre.

At the same time BREIN head Tim Kuik also explained why they target small players and why they keep the site names a secret.

“New sites are popping up, but we take these down faster and faster so they can’t gain an audience,” Kuik says. “Our goal is to limit the availability of illegal sites so people rather use legal platforms. BREIN doesn’t publish any names because some sites relocate and start over elsewhere.”

The MPAA, perhaps wisely, didn’t release a comment at all.

That leaves us with a final question for our readers. Do you happen to know of a torrent site that has gone missing over the past several days, or do you have more information on the affected sites? Feel free to get in touch with us.

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Paying Users To Report Fake Torrents is Illegal, Anti-Piracy Outfit Claims

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TorLock, a torrent site that claims to be virtually free of ‘fake torrents’, is offering $1 to users for every fake file that they can find. The offer was put in place by the site’s owner since he’s confident that the site’s collection of 140,738 torrents is as clean as it gets. However, the Indian anti-piracy outfit Aiplex Software is determined to put an end to the offer, claiming it is highly illegal.

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Founded a few months ago, TorLock is a relatively unknown name to most BitTorrent users. Nonetheless, the site has already captured the attention of various anti-piracy outfits.

In common with most torrent indexers and search engines, TorLock is committed to ensure that DMCA takedown requests from copyright holders are handled properly, but there’s one outfit for which this is not enough.

TorLock advertises itself as the “no fakes torrent site” and claims that it is nearly impossible to find a fake file among the 140,738 torrents that the site currently hosts. To illustrate the confidence the site owner has in TorLock’s “VeriPLUS” system, he has an open offer to pay $1 for every fake torrent users are able to find.

“Simply take the url of the fake torrent and paste it into the message box, remember to give a valid email where we can get in contact with you to discuss the torrent in question and arrange payment,” says a statement on the site. TorLock’s owner Jack told us that this offer still stands. “I’m sure that we are one of the biggest verified sources in the torrent world right now,” he said.

The offer is an interesting gesture, and it’s good to see efforts being taken by site owners to prevent spam and fakes from flooding indexers. However, the $1 per fake torrent offer is not liked by everyone, the Indian anti-piracy outfit Aiplex in particular. Yes, the same Aiplex that admitted to DDoSing torrent sites, to conspiring with the Government and signing contracts worth thousands of dollars to protect Bollywood films.

Aiplex claims the offer is highly illegal, which it pointed out in an email to the TorLock owner.

As always, the correspondance from Aiplex is not the most outstanding literary work, and even plain incomprehensible here and there, but the core message is clear. As can be read below, Aiplex believes that offering users money for their fake torrent reports is highly illegal. The reason they give is an odd one though, to say the least (note: verbatim quote).

We have seen u advertise in ur site that you give $1 for fake. We trust this is highly illegal and we will fight to protect our clients rights. You cannot pay people for other’s material, you do not own the rights. We have already ban ur site. Now we will come after u and the people who host ur illegal website… The Indian Govt wont take this and will suport us in the battle against ur and other sites. Other people dont pay users for helping piracy. U will get in trouble for this… u do not understand who u are dealing with. We demand u remove the offer and also adhere to the many requests we have sent u to delete illegal files… We will not ask again…

Aiplex seems to argue that TorLock’s owner can’t pay users for reporting fake files, because he doesn’t own the rights to these fake torrents. This makes no sense, right? If we follow this logic it would be illegal for TorLock’s owner to take down torrent files following a DMCA complaint as well.

We’ve read this and the rest of the email Aiplex sent a few times now but we have really no idea what it means. The only thing that’s clear to us is that TorLock’s owner Jack appears to be in serious trouble and Aiplex and the Indian Government have allegedly set the wheels in motion for a site-ban.

Too bad, TorLock seemed to be a promising site.

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Empornium and PureTNA Permanently Shut Down

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Two of the Internet’s biggest adult entertainment BitTorrent trackers have today confirmed us that they have permanently closed down. With comfortably more than 2.5 million members between them, the closure of Empornium and PureTNA leaves a sizeable number of porn fans both empty handed and with nowhere to put their seeds.

For the last few days the huge BitTorrent porn trackers Empornium and PureTNA have been dark, with both sites routing to 127.0.0.1. Understandably, users of the sites have been pretty concerned since these pair of giants, which are connected by the same management, have massive memberships and are long-standing mainstays of the community.

To give an idea of size, PureTNA had in excess of 1,329,500 members, Empornium a similar number. At last count PureTNA’s database sat at nearly 67,000 torrents servicing around 630,000 peers. Empornium listed more than 82,000 torrents and 660,000 peers. That’s a hell of a lot of filth and depravity, just how their members liked it.

But for their users, speaking of the sites in the permanent past tense is the sad reality today. The management of both Empornium and PureTNA have confirmed to us that they are “offline permanently”. Requests for elaboration were declined, but a comment obtained from Breeze, the manager of both sites, said simply: “Such is bittorrent life.”

So considering that both sites had continued to grow, both in terms of torrents and membership, why suddenly close down?

The main unconfirmed rumor to have gained traction is that due to a lack of investment in code development, both sites have been vulnerable to malicious attacks. This resulted in one or both of the sites being hacked in recent days. Rather than pump money into the sites to prevent this happening again, their hard drives were wiped by the sites’ owners to protect user privacy, or so the story goes.

The other rumor, which is circulating on the fringes of the adult entertainment industry, is that the sites buckled under legal pressure, or at least the threat of it. As can be seen from a list retrievable via Google cache which was updated only last week, dozens of porn sites and studios have issued some kind of legal “do not upload” orders to the sites.

While there may be some triumphant gloating from elements of the porn industry, these lists could merely be an indication that both sites were trying to stay within the law by abiding by the desires of copyright holders who preferred for their material not to be shared on the sites. In any event, with the demise of both sites, that point is moot.

Interestingly, although PureTNA is still listed by Google, a similar search for Empornium draws a a complete blank. As far as the world’s leading search engine is concerned, Empornium doesn’t exist. In the future, those looking for nostalgia will have to settle for the Empornium song from Futuristic Sex Robotz which lives on with YouTube.

Whatever the reason – hackings, legal pressure, a combination of the two or just plain old lack of interest in continuing – the sites are not coming back so for BitTorrent porn consumers this certainly marks the end of an era.

Whether Cheggit can cope with the Empornium/PureTNA refugees will remain to be seen. Their servers, in common with the actors in the videos they index, are likely to be puffing and panting for some time.

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EZTV Crowdsources New Design, New Features Coming

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EZTV is arguably one of the largest BitTorrent communities, but unlike other BitTorrent sites it has no income stream. All the costs are paid out of the pockets of the site’s owner, which is a costly hobby with 30 million visitors a month. So now the site is planning to roll out several new features along with a request for help from the public to come up with a new design.

Image is Loading....EZTV was founded in the spring of 2005 after some prominent TV-torrent sites were shut down. With relatively little competition it soon grew to become a household brand and the leading TV-torrent distribution group.

Today, five years later, EZTV has become one of the largest torrent sites on the Internet. With 30 million visitors a month the site is still expanding, and feature-wise the site’s owners also have plans to grow.

One of the new features currently in development is the integration of ezRSS with EZTV’s “my pages” feature. This means that users can setup an RSS feed for their favorite shows on the EZTV website, and use this feed to automatically download new shows.

However, while working on the new features EZTV’s founder realized that the site’s design could also use an overhaul. In recent months a lot of money has been invested on the hardware side, but the design has remained the same. But with some help from the public this may soon change.

“So I have started work on the EZTV codebase, getting ready to implement a whole bunch of new features we hope you will all love, and I thought it was about time to come up with a new visual style to the website,” Novaking writes in an announcement.

“Now this is where it becomes interesting, I’m terrible at graphics/design so I think this could be the best time to see what you loyal fans might be able to do in regards to taking this site to the next level of TV content,” he adds.

True to the sharing nature, the new EZTV design will be crowdsourced. People who want to help out are encouraged to submit their designs, which should be simple and support mobile devices, Google TV and tablets such as the iPad.

We asked Novaking to reveal a bit more about the upcoming features that he’s working on, but aside from the ezRSS integration he was reluctant to share his plans. EZTV users will have to be patient and wait for the new features until they are ready to be rolled out.

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