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Tag: torrent trackers

  • The Pirate Bay Did Not Get Shut Down

    The Pirate Bay went down for quite some time today. Whenever the site goes down for more than five minutes, people begin to fear the worst. There was also the small coincidence of The Pirate Bay’s former host being raided by the police today that added to the concern.

    Well, the folks from The Pirate Bay are here to set the record straight. They were not raided by the police, nor were they shut down.

    The Pirate Bay46 minutes ago

    Dear internet. We have not been raided. We are not shutting down. We like turtles, waffles and you. Sorry for not fulfilling your pirate needs tonight. It’s ok if you cheat on us with another site, just once. We know that you still love us, deep down in your cursed pirate heart. <3 Powered by socialditto  1,000+ likes ·  252 comments

    So what’s the problem? According to TorrentFreak, and a subsequent post on the site’s Facebook wall, it’s just a simple power outage. For now, there’s nothing to worry about.

    What about The Pirate Bay’s former host being raided? According to TorrentFreak, police raided Swedish hosting company PRQ today. They were reportedly trying to find servers containing copyrighted material. The hosting company may have been targeted because it was founded by two of The Pirate Bay’s co-founders, and used to house the servers used by The Pirate Bay in 2006. Several torrent sites that were hosted on PRQ’s servers have been taken offline as a result of the police raid.

    Long story short, The Pirate Bay is doing just fine. The site is not hosted at PRQ, and a power outage is to blame for the current downtime. It’s a little strange that the downtime coincided with the police raid, but stranger things have happened.

  • Private BitTorrent Tracker Hacked, Passwords Leaked By Afghani Hackers

    Hackers generally view BitTorrent trackers as friendly entities. Members of Anonymous are constantly extolling the virtues of The Pirate Bay and other trackers. Some hackers, however, are proving to be not as friendly.

    It was revealed this morning that RevolutionTT, a private BitTorrent tracker, had been hacked. A group simply calling themselves “Afghanistan Hackers” uploaded a text file containing 19,000 username/password combinations for the exclusive torrent tracker. They encourage people to log in to private accounts, change the password, and enjoy the site for themselves.

    TorrentFreak reports that the information leaked in the document is real. People have been using the username/password combinations to log into paid accounts. From there, people began to send fraudulent emails from the hacked accounts, or began looking to see if the same usernames or passwords had been used on other sites.

    It’s already strange to see a torrent tracker get hacked, but the response has been even stranger. The admins at RevolutionTT are claiming they were not hacked. They have even started to ban members who are asking legitimate questions about the hack.

    Regardless, old and current members of RevolutionTT are encouraged to change their passwords now. These kind of attacks can have ripple effects across the Internet. A victim on one site can find that all of their accounts across the Internet have been hacked simply because they used the same password across all of them.

    There is a sliver of good news in all of this. The data leaked by the hackers may be an old dataset. Some of the usernames/passwords combinations work, but others do not. The hackers say they will release more information in the next few weeks though. The next batch could be more recent datasets that could cause even more harm.

    A hack of this level is nothing new. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the kind of world we live in now. The significance of this particular attack shows that nothing is sacred. Hackers aren’t drawing lines anymore, and they will attack anything that has the potential for profit or chaos. The group here has obviously obtained the latter, and they may just obtain the former if the information from RevolutionTT proves to be useful.

  • Google Is Now Censoring The Pirate Bay In Autocomplete

    Google freaked out the collective Internet last month when they announced the controversial plan to add DMCA takedown notices into account when providing search results. This would make it so that sites with questionable reputations would be placed below more legitimate sites. It was obviously an attempt to make peace with the copyright industry that has long blamed Google for enabling piracy. It would appear that Google is giving in even more to the content industry with their latest move.

    It was revealed today by TorrentFreak that Google is now blocking The Pirate Bay from showing up in Google’s instant or autocomplete searches. When searching for The Pirate Bay, users would normally type it in as one text string like “thepiratebay.” When searching for the site like that, you will now get these results:

    Google Censoring The Pirate Bay

    What’s funny is that The Pirate Party and the UK proxy for The Pirate Bay both show up. Those searching for The Pirate Bay may instead end up at the Web site for The Pirate Party and learn of their values in regards to file sharing. I’m sure the MPAA and RIAA wouldn’t like the youth of our nation converting to Kopimism.

    Like always, performing a direct search still won’t block The Pirate Bay from showing up in search results.

    Google Censorship The PIrate Bay

    It should be noted that Google is the only search provider that is blocking The Pirate Bay on the autocomplete level. Bing still refers would be pirates to the torrent tracker after just typing in “thepirate.”

    Google Censorship The Pirate Bay

    What does The Pirate Bay think about this latest attempt to drive traffic away from them? They really don’t care. They told TorrentFreak that they haven’t noticed a decline in referrals from Google. Besides, they previously noted that they consider themselves a search engine that’s competing with Google. More direct searches only serves to give them more advertising dollars.

    Even if The Pirate Bay doesn’t care, it’s still worth nothing how Google never enters kill mode with the Web site and other torrent trackers. They may delist them from autocomplete or instant answers, but these can still be found on Google with relative ease. I don’t see things getting too out of hand until Google outright censors The Pirate Bay or others from appearing in search results.

  • Police Crackdown On BitTorrent Trackers In Sweden

    We reported that the Sweden Supreme Court held up the conviction of the Pirate Bay founders. It seems that decision has had more of an effect on file-sharing sites across the net in Sweden than previously thought.

    TorrentFreak is reporting that Swepiracy, a site that facilitated torrent downloads, has been shut down by authorities in Sweden and the Netherlands. The Swedish anti-piracy group Antipiratbyrån was behind the closure as they claimed the site was a major player in illegally distributing Swedish films.

    The take down comes on the heels of Antipiratbyrån saying that Swepiracy ignored multiple warnings to cease their activities. In light of being threatened, they pulled a Pirate Bay and attempted to protect themselves from the hand of the law by moving their domain name.

    It appears that Antipiratbyrån is using Swepiracy as an example. They will take the operators of Swepiracy to court and hope to get a similar amount of money from them as they did from The Pirate Bay founders. They are sending out a message to all the other torrent trackers in Sweden – shut down or you’re next.

    TorrentFreak is also reporting other arrests with a man accused of uploading content to The Pirate Bay being apprehended in Gothenberg, Sweden.

    The scare has been enough to shut down sites, like BTJunkie did a few weeks ago. Bibliotik, an online library of sorts, shut down recently and left this message on their front page:

    Bibliotik has shutdown all operations. We are no longer able to assume the risks involved. The staff would like to apologize for the sudden (but necessary) decision and thank everyone that participated and made Bibliotik such a great place for so long. We love you guys!

    None of this is going to stop until we have better laws in place to protect content creators and the consumer. While content creators have a right to protect their content, treating those that infringe on that copyright like war criminal isn’t going to solve anything. It’s a temporary solution to a much larger problem and the anti-piracy groups are just making it worse. I suggest they take a look at Reddit’s Freedom of Internet Act for inspiration as to how digital copyright infringement should be regulated.