Tag: PIRACY

A few days ago there was a smattering of reports on NEC's new pirate-detection software. In essence, this software scans the original content and creates a digital signature for each and every frame. The signature is very small (only 76 bytes) and can then be compared against videos on sites like YouTube or Vimeo. NEC touts an accuracy of 96% and only five false-positives per million. But ...

A weird, disconcerting site that goes by the ominous name of 'Men in Grey' has just been discovered. It's an open site, but no one quite knows if it's meant to be. Plastered with terms like 'officer', 'authentication' and 'auditor console', the site appears to be a tool that's used to hunt down illegal P2P file sharers. Give it a go -- view the complete report and check the illegal activity on ...

Those crazy phishers! Barely a day goes by without some crazy new method of liberating people of their hard-earned cash. Today though, we have a new attack vector: rather than focusing on the old and stupid, this attack targets pirates! This new malware attack, detailed by TorrentFreak, relies on a combination of fear and uncertainty to extort money from file sharers. The malware installs ...

Vuze might claim to be 'the most powerful BitTorrent client in the world'... but it isn't the fastest; not by a long shot! Take a look at the graph above -- this isn't just some kind of 'anomaly'. You can quite clearly see the graphs mirroring each other -- but uTorrent is simply faster than Vuze. The study carried out by University of California researcher Mario Iliofotou, together with ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/04/08/digital-economy-bill-set-to-pass-into-uk-law-watch-out-hapless/'; In what can only be described as a bunch of witless, whipped cronies dabbling in shit they really have no clue about, the dying United Kingdom parliament is about to pass the Digital Economy Bill into law. Ostensibly, the new law is about protecting intellectual property ...

In what must surely be the least surprising news of 2010, a study by a French university found that piracy increased after France's enactment of a 'Three Strikes Law'. Under the bill, which went into power in July 2009, repeat offenders can be cut off from the Internet. If being cut off is deemed not suitable for the villain's heinous crimes, the judge can instead levy a 300,000 Euro fine or send ...

32 years ago today, the first electronic bulletin board system -- or BBS -- was born. As the brainchild of a nerd stuck in the Great Blizzard of 1978, the first BBS was created as a way to circumvent the fundamental, age-old rules of socializing -- it was merely a a digital version of the bulletin boards found in the foyers of libraries and churches around the world. We had been making use of the ...

In what must surely be a sign that schools and universities are under-funded, a network security dude at the University of Georgia has just been arrested for shaking down multiple file-downloading students. Two weeks ago he approached a female student and said he could make the "situation go away in exchange for money" -- he was promising to keep the data private, rather than forward it to the ...

BitTorrent is an extraordinarily useful technology that allows for more efficient sharing of perfectly legal things like Linux distributions. Nobody's denying, though, that it's most often used to download things like Modern Warfare 2 or the latest season of Heroes. The BitTorrent census, conducted by a Princeton University senior, confirms these suspicions. It turns out that the most heavily ...

Don't get me wrong, I know that people have been posting digital copies of copyrighted books online for decades. While recent technological advancements have made digital distribution of music and movie files easier than ever before, eBooks are tiny, tiny files. It didn't take very long to download a book over a 56k connection. But it's not internet bandwidth or digital distribution channels ...

In today's day and age it's pretty rare for the owner of a large-scale copyright-infringement website to escape the law. They can run, but they can't hide! The cases are often settled out of court, but when they do go to trial it's incredibly uncommon to see a not guilty verdict. But that all changes today! Go UK! The owner of Oink, one of the largest British-run file-sharing sites, has walked ...

Have you ever put much thought into Internet piracy? 'Ooh, cool, tons of free stuff!' -- no, I mean, really thought about it. digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/01/06/bulletproof-safe-havens-are-all-the-rage-for-internet-pirates/'; In almost every Western nation software and music piracy is theft. In the eyes of the law it's wrong. There's simply nothing more to it: it's ...

I don't know if this kind of thing happens over in the UK (probably in the London Times, if anything), but it seems the New York Times has given Bono of U2 fame a one-off guest column in their paper. In it he has a bit of a mindless rant above the next ten years: cars, pollution, sports and then, out of frickin' no where: PIRACY. Citing, of all things, China's ability to quash online dissent, he ...

2009 was the biggest year ever for TV piracy. In fact, downloading shows has become so popular that some shows had download totals higher than their average TV viewership. TorrentFreak has compiled the staggering download numbers to reveal the top 10 most-pirated shows of 2009, and you may be surprised just how many times your favorite shows were torrented. Heroes came in at number 1 with ...

The votes are cast! Or, rather, the seeds and peers are cast! After poring through numerous lists of figures, the nautical masters over at TorrentFreak have tallied up the total number of (illegal) video game downloads in 2009. This year's winner: Modern Warfare 2. Big surprise. What might surprise you is the sheer volume of downloads: 4.1 million. In six weeks. Hahahah. Sorry, it's ...