Items tagged with pirate
When people are hit by malware, it typically ends with files being locked or some other terrible outcome for the end-user. However, researchers have now discovered a piece of malware that turns the tables on people who try to pirate content by blocking illegal websites. As it turns out, perhaps not all malware is bad… Sophos researcher Andrew Brandt reported yesterday that the mysterious vigilante malware typically came packaged in fake games sent over Discord. However, it could also come bundled with productivity or security tools like "AVG Remediation" or "Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise 2019." When the fake software is first run, it creates a fake popup saying a dynamically linked...
Read more...
Who would have thought that bootleg watch faces would become a thing? Yet that is what is occurring as smartwatches continue to make their way to consumers. The Apple Watch isn’t out yet, but the need for consumers to customize the watch face of their device is growing as smartwatches like the Moto 360, allows them to customize the watch face. However, this has prompted luxury watchmakers to band together in order to remove watch faces from download sites.Users wishing to customize the look of their smartwatch can go to websites, such as FaceRepo, in order to download watch faces that are digital copies of luxury watches from companies such as Rolex, Cartier, and Tag Heuer. It’s a much cheaper...
Read more...
Google's motto may be "Don't be evil," but some companies who rely on copyright laws for income such as the music, film, and book publishing industries, feel the search giant is betraying this motto by making it too easy for users to find pirated material. Google is very good at organizing the Internet and helping users find what they want through a simple search. According to some companies however, that's exactly the problem—Google is good at helping users find anything, including illegal downloads. While it's true that copyright is the lifeblood of the creative industries, some people make the counter argument that the creative businesses are stuck in the past and simply need to find...
Read more...
Digital pirates in search of free reading material are turning to illicit download sites where they can obtain copyrighted eBooks free of charge. The obvious allure for eBook pirates is just like anything else -- free treasure -- but in addition to not having to fork over pieces of eight, pirates are attracted to getting their hands on copies of unreleased books. One of those books is "77 Shadow Street" by Dean Koontz, which is available to order in the U.S. but won't be released in the U.K. until January 19, 2012. According to a report in the U.K.'s Daily Mail, up to 20 percent of all eBook downloads are now illegally obtained, presenting a growing problem for publishers, as well as Amazon,...
Read more...
Want to prosecute people who are downloading files illegally? Well, if you fine them, you might be taking money out of the hands of your best customers, a new survey shows. It's not the first such survey to come to this conclusion. However, it is the latest. The study, published on Sunday by U.K. think tank Demos, surveyed 1,008 people aged between 18 and 50 last month. It found that those who admit to illegally downloading music spent an average of £77 a year on music, which is £33 more than those who claim that they never do so. The British Phonographic Industry estimates that seven million U.K. users download files illegally annually, which will cost the industry £200 million...
Read more...
You know what we haven't heard much about lately? Piracy. It used to be all the rage, but after iTunes (and pretty much every other online music store) went DRM-free, it seems those stormy waters have calmed. Or, on second thought, maybe no one was talking about it. New research from the University of Hertfordshire over in the UK has found that an alarming amount of 14 to 24 years olds are still pirating an insane amount of music. How insane? Try 8,000 tracks for each person that puts on their eye patch and heads out to the digital sea. Now, we should warn you that these numbers can't be taken as 100% true. The research involved a survey, which was commissioned by none other than UK Music, so...
Read more...
Sweden's PiratePartiet (Pirate Party) has secured a win for the European Parliament in yesterday's Swedish European Parliament Elections, becoming - at least in this election - Sweden's 4th biggest party.According to official sources, the Pirate Party secured 7.1% of votes and elected to the European Parliament Christian Engstrom to voice the concerns of filesharers and throughout Europe. Thanks to the Swedish authority's enforcement of a court mandate and shutting down the Pirate Bay, the attempt at restricting the activity of filesharing has backfired and provided a soapbox of sorts for the Party.The Pirate Party's arguments are towards the "reform of copyright law", by making non-commercial...
Read more...
Ah yes, music piracy. But if your own star isn't exactly close-mouthed (pun intended) with his new tracks, what can you do? U2 has recently put the finishing touches to their first studio album in four years. Four of those songs found their way to the Internet after Bono played the songs a bit too loudly on his stereo at his villa in the south of France. A sharp-eared passerby recorded the songs and apparently posted the songs to YouTube, according to The Sun. Of course, they didn't stick around on YouTube very long. The upcoming album is called "No Line On The Horizon." While this is, of course, offbeat and funny news, it's hardly that important a leak. Assuming what's on the web is current...
Read more...
Italy has been showing BitTorrent no mercy lately. First, Italy shuts down the country's largest BitTorrent tracker site, Colombo-BT.org, a couple of weeks ago; and now it is trying to block country-wide access to The Pirate Bay--the Swedish-based BitTorrent site that claims to be "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker"--by ordering all Italian ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay. According to TorrentFreak, the initial country-wide blocking of the site was successful: "An insider working at an Internet provider in Italy told TorrentFreak that all the relevant large access ISPs in Italy have complied with the request to block the popular BitTorrent tracker." However, The Pirate Bay was quick...
Read more...
A recently published study on the DVD movie copying habits of consumers in the U.S. and U.K. finds that roughly one third of the survey respondents admit to copying commercial DVDs within the last six months. The survey was conducted by Futuresource Consulting and was sponsored by Macrovision--a company that has a vested financial stake in convincing DVD distributors that they are losing revenue by people making copies of discs.The demographic group that is most likely be a DVD copier is 18 to 24-year old males. Curiously, 36 percent of U.K. respondents admitted to copying DVDs, while only 32 percent of U.S. respondents 'fessed up. Either the Brits believe stronger in their right to copy or perhaps...
Read more...
We’ve said it before, but crime just doesn’t pay folks:“Barry Gitarts, 25, of Brooklyn, New York, was convicted Thursday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. In addition to up to five years in prison, Gitarts could face a fine of US$250,000, three years of probation and a requirement that he make full restitution, the DOJ said.Gitarts was a key member of the Internet music piracy group Apocalypse Production Crew (APC) from at least June 2003 through April 2004, the DOJ said. Gitarts paid for and administered a computer server located in Texas that APC group members used to upload and download hundreds of thousands of copies of pirated music, movies, software and video...
Read more...
Pirate Bay has announced plans to Danish ISP Tele2 over their court ordered block of their web site that began in February. Pirate Bay set up a sister site with trackers called The Jesper Bay to prove just how ineffectual the block was, and as a result the block was more or less an exercise in futility.“The court case was initiated by the IFPI - the infamous anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry. The IFPI later tried to use the “landmark decision” to force Swedish ISPs to do the same, but failed. In fact, it seems that filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay is actually illegal according to European law.”Pirate Bay claims that if they win damages from the case, they...
Read more...
The Pirate Bay, the popular BitTorrent tracking site, has decided to expand its services and opened its own blogging site. The site, BayWords, is uncensored, and advertised as a place for bloggers who want to write whatever they want without fear of being shut down by their blog host.The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material.This, of course, goes against...
Read more...
Various companies and even the RIAA have either settled with or won numerous law suits against pirates and/or networks that allow piracy such as the old Napster or Kazaa. We're talking at least 9-figures worth of damages awarded and/or settlements paid off, but yet the artists don't seem to be getting paid:"Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for," said lawyer John Branca, who has represented Korn, Don Henley, and The Rolling Stones, among others."Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don't get paid soon."It would be an incredibly ironic end to the music...
Read more...
During the development of Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista, Microsoft representatives had stated on numerous occasions that the company planned to plug a number of holes in the OS to prevent pirates from circumventing the activation process or defeating the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) anti-piracy mechanism. According to Adrian Kingsley-Hughes’ blog at ZD-Net, however, even with SP1 installed, circumventing Windows activation is still quite easy. “First off, the hack. The hack in question is another OEM BIOS hack but packaged under the name of Vista Loader. This hack is similar to the Paradox OEM BIOS. The Paradox hack was the most commonly used Vista activation hack...
Read more...
Don't get your hopes up; it's not Universal Music or even EMI. It's a small label from Germany, and it's already folded. Nonetheless, a few days ago Dependent records’ CEO Stefan Herwig decided to upload all the albums from his label -which mainly features aggrotech, electro-industrial and futurepop artists- onto The Pirate Bay.In the description on the torrent download page Herwig writes: “I closed down my record label Dependent Records for good. But since I want my music to be heard by the people out there, everything I have ever published is now available on The Pirate Bay,” stressing that it’s a legal torrent, approved by the label. Ironically, the reason the label closed down:...
Read more...
According to a forum post at the IsoHunt website, the good folks at AMD were nice enough to hook up the admins with a pair of pre-production B3-stepping Opteron 2352 processors, what appear to be the first processors of their type to be "out in the wild". AMD's B3 stepping is supposed to fix the TLB errata affecting current quad-core Opteron and Phenom processors. But what's more interesting is that IsoHunt - a site that facilitates piracy - apparently got the processors directly from AMD to power their servers. "I'd like to thank the nice people at AMD for allowing us to have 2 pre-production engineering samples of their Opteron 2352 CPUs. These cpus have been installed in our primary...
Read more...
Swedish authorities have been threatening this since last month. They kept their promise.The Swedish prosecutor Hakan Roswall has announced the charges against four individuals involved with The Pirate Bay. The four, aged 23 to 37, are being charged with “assisting copyright infringement” of 4 software applications, 9 films and 22 music tracks.“The operation of The Pirate Bay is financed through advertising revenues. In that way it commercially exploits copyright-protected work and performances,” said prosecutor Hakan Roswall in a statement. The prosecution claims the site generates annual ad revenue of more than $4 million.Four million dollars? Is that all? Since The Pirate...
Read more...
We'll save a lot of time if we stop arguing over whether copyright infringement is stealing. It's possible, so it's going to happen. Some of the record companies are tired of playing whack-a mole with file-sharers and have agreed to participate in a free peer to peer network, supported by advertising, that promises 25 million available songs, with no limit. It's called Qtrax.The service has been endorsed by the very same record companies - including EMI, Universal Music and Warner Music – that have chased file-sharers through the courts in a doomed attempt to prevent piracy. The gamble is that fans will put up with a limited amount of advertising around the Qtrax website’s jukebox in return for...
Read more...
I love internet startups. It's fun to watch the trajectory they follow, from not-half-bad idea through college dorm jury-rig setup to garage to venture capitalist office to front page news or bankruptcy, sometimes both depending on the details. Picky Pirate is a new website that serves as a meta-review aggregator and ranking system for reviews of available music, games, and movies, and then offers the user a one-click link to whatever torrents might be available for the desired content.Ehud, the developer of PickyPirate told TorrentFreak that a friend asked him why nobody created a mashup of BitTorrent and Metacritic, “I immediately thought ‘Hey, that’s a really good idea!’”...
Read more...
Radiohead recently broke away from not only their record label, but from the entire recording label paradigm and decided to release their new album, In Rainbows, over the Internet for the very fair price of whatever you wanted to pay, including nothing at all.With a price like 'free', you'd figure that piracy would be virtually eliminated. Think again:“But for hard-core music pirates, even free hasn’t been enough of a draw. According to music industry analysts, hundreds of thousands of Web users who frequent copyright-infringing file-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and TorrentSpy, have chosen to download In Rainbows illegally, distributing their contraband around the Internet just...
Read more...
In what can only be called ironic, or humorous, or maybe a slap in the face, infamous Swedish Bittorrent site The Pirate Bay has taken over a domain formerly owned by a recording industry group.In yet another snub to anti-piracy efforts, infamous Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay has taken over IFPI.com, a domain formerly owned by the recording industry group by the same name. IFPI, previously known as the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, pushes for anti-piracy enforcement in 75 countries.IFPI currently operatest IFPI.org. The Pirate Bay says it has legitimate uses in mind for the domain, promoting the International Federation of Pirates Interests. ...
Read more...
