Pirate Bay - spreading the word with BitTorrent

[flamesong]

In a response to a thread about a new 9/11 movie called, 'Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime', I suggested that sharing media using BitTorrent might be a useful tool.

This isn't the first time that it has been suggested but it seems that it hasn't been well received - perhaps because it might not appeal to technophobes - but the potential is enormous.

For those who are unfamiliar with the technology, BitTorrent is a means of sharing files using a peer to peer protocol, i.e. there is no central server which hosts the files - you download them (or bits of them) from other peoples' computers.

A special program, known as a BitTorrent client is required which does all the work for you. Most of them are free to download and can be found here:

BitTorrent clients for Mac OSX

BitTorrent clients for Windows XP

You will then need to download the Torrent of the file you wish to download. You could think of a Torrent file as a ticket which tells the BitTorrent client what bits of the file to download and where to look for them. Once this is done, depending on how big the file is and how many people are sharing it, you could be watching a DVD quality version (though many files are not) of many 9/11 documentaries (or other films, sound files or other material) within hours.

The best place by far to look for material regarding 9/11 is:

http://conspiracycentral.net:6969

It is necessary to sign up (for free) and log in to download, though the site's server has expenses which need to be met and donations are gratefully received.

There is a lot of information alongside each file so it might be useful to know a little bit of lingo:

SD/Seeders - people sharing the file
DL/Leechers - people who are downloading the file

And a few guidelines:

Look for files with more seeders as they will download quicker.

Once you have downloaded your file, keep the client running as you will then be seeding (sharing) the file with others.

BitTorrent uses a special port (like a virtual ID card) to identify data coming in and out and only shares files which you designate for sharing, so it is very secure.

I'm a Mac user so I can't really offer any kind of technical support on this for people with PC's but I'm sure there are plenty of people on here who can.

[Jim]

uTorrent has UPnP functionality - check setup/preferences. Enable UPnP on your firewall/router (default gateway) if it has UPnP functionality too and uTorrent will open and forward the port to your PC. That way you'll get best download and upload speeds. Keep the upload speeds limited to ~75% (max) of your upload bandwidth e.g. ADSL 2Mb/256Kb = (256/10) * .75 ~= 20 KB/s (200 Kb/s) max. I find that anything around 15 KB/s is good, anything below 10 KB/s is not so good. Do not use more than 75% of your upload speed as you will impact TCP/IP performance.

[TonyGosling]

Pirate Bay defendant: we can't and won't pay
I'd rather burn all I own than pay fine, Pirate Bay defendant Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi declares in online press conference
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/apr/17/pirate-bay-verdict-pe ter-sunder-kolmisoppi-online-press-conference

[TonyGosling]

Music 'piracy' website founder acquitted of fraud

Murad Ahmed, Technology Reporter
From Times Online January 15, 2010
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article69901 87.ece

A man accused of running a sophisticated music piracy website used by more than 200,000 members was acquitted of conspiracy to defraud today.

Alan Ellis, 26, was accused of making hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Oink website, which he ran alone from his own bedroom.

But a jury at Teesside Crown Court unanimously cleared the software engineer of the charge. Mr Ellis, from Middlesbrough, smiled as the jury foreman returned the not guilty verdict.

During the trial, Mr Ellis had told the jury that he set up Oink in his home in an effort to brush up on his computing skills while a student at Teesside University.

He told the court that he had set up the website “to further my skills. To better my skills for employability”.

When police raided his terraced house in October 2007, they found almost $300,000 in his accounts.

Peter Makepeace, for the prosecution, said: “At the time this website was taken down, there were approximately 200,000 active members.

“Those users had access to about 200,000 audio files.

“This site had facilitated a staggering 21 million downloads of those available files.”

He added: "This is not about prosecuting some poor minnow who has taped a record one night and circulated it to their friends.

“This is about large scale, professional, clever, technical ripping off.”

But Mr Ellis said the money was used to pay for the rental of the computers that ran the website, and that any “surplus” was intended to eventually purchase a server.

He added that the website was developed from a free template, which included with it a “Torrent” file-sharing facility — a popular method used by some to download music illegally.

The court heard that users on the site were required to make a donation to be able to invite friends to join the site.

The site did not hold music itself, but it had allowed members to find other people on the web who were prepared to share files with others, allowing people to get hold of music for free.

Mr Ellis, who was born in Leeds and grew up in south Manchester, studying A levels in Cheadle, argued that there was no intention to defraud copyright holders. He had a full-time job as a software engineer and said running the site was a hobby.

The prosecution said he told police officers: “All I do is really like Google, to really provide a connection between people. None of the music is on my website.”

The prosecution said that when interviewed by police, Mr Ellis refused to answer questions about money, and said it was “out of my hands” what his site’s members did.

The prosecution argued that none of the cash made by way of donations was going to the music industry.

“Every penny was going to Mr Ellis,” Mr Makepeace said.

“He hadn’t sung a note, he hadn’t played an instrument, he hadn’t produced anything.

“The money was not going to the people it rightly belonged to, it was going to Mr Ellis.”.

Mr Ellis declined to answer questions on leaving court.

[TonyGosling]

Pirate Bay co-founder appears in Danish court
Published time: December 18, 2013 04:09
Edited time: December 18, 2013 19:53 Get short URL

The Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg (Photo by Nicolas Vigier / flickr.com)
Download video (29.11 MB)
http://rt.com/news/pirate-bay-danish-court-403/

The Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has appeared in court over charges of hacking into Danish government databases. Since Sweden extradited him to Denmark he has been kept in solitary confinement his mother describes as “torture.”

Wednesday's hearing was closed-door, meaning that entry to the proceedings was restricted. While using phones and cameras was prohibited, journalists were allowed to make notes during the pre-hearing. Henrik Moltke of Information.dk made and published some notes before he and the other journalist "left in orderly manner".

Svartholm Warg is facing 6 years in prison on charges of infiltrating the Danish social security database, driver’s license database, and the shared IT system used in the Schengen zone.

He had already been serving a one year jail term in Sweden for hacking. After more serious charges against him there were dropped and he lost an appeal to the Swedish Supreme Court, he was extradited to neighboring Denmark.

In an open letter to the Swedish government he argued that the person who orchestrated the attack could have controlled his computer remotely.

Although legal trouble isn’t anything new for Svartholm Warg or the other founders of the Pirate Bay, his mother, Kristina Svartholm Warg, and his lawyer have been increasingly worried about the conditions he has been held in in Denmark since arriving in prison there last month.

“They haven’t allowed him to keep anything in his cell from his books that he brought from Sweden, no magazines and that type of thing. And being in isolation like that, just with Danish TV to look at, nothing else to do, I mean it’s not good for any person to be like that,” Kristina told RT.

She also said that she believed the Danish court will acquit her son as he was also acquitted for allegedly hacking into Nordea Bank and the case against him in Denmark is similar to the case he faced in Sweden.

Warg’s lawyer, Louisa Hoj, also said that her client’s solitary confinement is down to an internal decision by the Danish prison service. Not only was he moved from a prison in central Copenhagen to one on the outskirts of the city but Hoj is puzzled at why his treatment could vary so much from Sweden to Denmark when the cases are so similar to each other.

But like his mother, the attorney was confident that the computer genius will be acquitted.

“He was not convicted of hacking Nordea.. and I think the material is somewhat the same in the Danish case. So I expect him not to be convicted of anything in Denmark,” she told RT.

Following the Wednesday hearing, Kristina Svartholm Warg tweeted that the custody for her son was extended to January 8, 2014.

Wikileaks’ Julian Assange has called Warg a political prisoner who is ideologically driven to inform the world.

“There are thousands of alleged cyber-criminals, but instead of dealing with these cases, we see vast resources diverted yet again by the Swedish state into smashing Gottfrid. These attempts include the first trial of Gottfrid after US pressure (extensively documented in US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks), his subsequent rendering from Cambodia by the Swedish intelligence service SAPO, his months of incommunicado detention in Sweden, and now his irregular extradition to Denmark – for a charge he was just acquitted of," Assange was quoted as saying by TorrentFreak.

Assange’s views were echoed by Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the first Pirate Party, who told RT that he believes Warg is being held to scare others not follow in his footsteps.

“So he was acquitted of this exact charge in a Swedish court under European Union laws. That means that he’s also acquitted in any European court for this exact crime. And yet he’s being held in solitary confinement in Denmark! That does not smell right at all. Again you cannot escape the feeling that somebody is out there to make an example out of him because he embarrassed Hollywood,” he said.

Hacktivist group Anonymous launched an online campaign to protest against the prison’s treatment of Svartholm Warg, calling it “wholly unacceptable” and “inhumane.” The group called on supporters to join them on Monday in a ‘tweetstorm,’ using the hashtag #Freeanakata. Meanwhile a group of Svartholm’s supporters staged rally in front of the courthouse in Copenhagen where he appeared on Wednesday.

[TonyGosling]

The Pirate Bay moves to Peru
By Pat Pilcher 12:32 PM Tuesday Dec 17, 2013
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid= 11173931

As the fight to take down one of the world's biggest torrent tracker sites continues, The Pirate Bay has again switched domain names, moving from thepiratebay.ac domain to thepiratebay.pe, and in the process has dropped some tantalising hints that they're going to launch a new system that will render domain names 'irrelevant'.



As written just a few days ago, thepiratebay.sx domain was pulled leaving hundreds of thousands of users not able to access the site. Within several hours The Pirate Bay reappeared as www.thepiratebay.ac.

The .AC domain represents the Ascension Islands, which are a UK controlled territory, and as such the move was largely a stopgap measure. Weary of yet another legal run-in as authorities attempt to shutter the thepiratebay.ac domain, the The Pirate Bay relocated to the Peruvian .pe domain which should theoretically be out of reach to US and UK authorities.

This also appears to be another temporary move, with The Pirate Bay team saying that they're updating their already hugely popular browser to ensure users will be able to search, download and upload files without the need for any centralised hosting and domain names.

The Pirate Bay browser has already proved to be massively popular in the UK and EU with users downloading it in a bid to get around government cyber-blockades to access The Pirate Bay.

As previously written, the current situation is rapidly forcing peer-to-peer and other related technologies to evolve to the point where most current methods of policing piracy are becoming futile. The sheer durability of The Pirate Bay may provide a potent illustration of this, but the big question is how will it all end?

[TonyGosling]

The shape of things to come folks
Reminds me of the hunt for Press TV's YouTube channel this
Probably the same jumped up little Nazis doing it too

The Pirate Bay moves to thepiratebay.gy after Peru suspends thepiratebay.pe

Mittal Mandalia
On December 18, 2013
http://www.techienews.co.uk


http://www.thepiratebay.gy
http://www.techienews.co.uk/973900/pirate-bay-moves-thepiratebay-gy-pe ru-suspends-thepiratebay-pe/

The Pirate Bay has rented a new home, thepiratebay.gy, for the fourth time in a week after Peru decided to suspend thepiratebay.pe.

The Pirate Bay has moved on to Guyana-based .GY ccTLD and the team behind the torrent indexing site has revealed that it is in possession of 70 odd domain names, which are still to be used, and quite a few methods through which users can access the torrent search and indexing site.

The trouble began last week after BREIN forced Sint Maarten registry to seize .SX domain names. The Pirate Bay was forced to move to .AC domain following this, but considering that the domain was under direct control of the UK it was matter of days before the .AC domain was seized as well.

Keeping in mind the impending danger The Pirate Bay moved to .pe domain while revealing that it was a temporary switch and it was working on a BitTorrent-powered browser, which will remove the dependency on domain names and central hosting as users will be able to store and share files directly.

But, before The Pirate Bay could out the aforementioned browser, thepiratebay.pe was suspended and it had to move to a .GY domain. There are all the chances that the Co-operative Republic of Guyana may also suspend the domain, but The Pirate Bay has revealed to the TorrentFreak that they are ready to switch.

“We have some 70 domain names left, so eventually we will find one that sticks”, a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

“A few domains have been prepared so we can switch over whenever’s needed.”

[TonyGosling]

Pirate Bay founder's mother calls her son's life in Danish prison a torture

Mother of co-founder of The Pirate Bay BitTorrent site Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, who was detained in Denmark in September, says that staying in full isolation in prison is like a torture for her son. Kristina Svartholm Warg says that her son is allowed to see the other prisoners only twice a week. He is being treated like a dangerous criminal. He is not allowed to have any personal belongings in his cell, even the books that he brought from Sweden were confiscated.

She says that she felt disgusted after visiting her son in prison. She stressed that while the court proceedings continue her son should be treated properly and not like a criminal.

Svartholm was arrested in Cambodia in August 2012 at the request of Swedish authorities and deported to his native country. In June 2013 he was found guilty of taking part in a hacker’s attack against the Swedish IT company Logica that provided services to the local tax administration and the Nordea bank. Svartholm was sent to jail for two years. In addition, he is facing a 6-year imprisonment in Denmark where he is charged with stealing the CSC company’s data that contained local police records.

Gottfrid Svartholm, a 29-year-old Swedish computer expert, is widely known as a co-founder of the world’s largest BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. It was created in 2003 and soon became one of the most popular world websites. The Alexa company’s global rating places it among the top 100 most visited Internet resources, the English-language RT resource reports.

The Pirate Bay is moving to North Korea?

The world's best known and most resilient torrent site, The Pirate Bay, has issued an official statement about its relocation to Pyongyang, North Korea. In a post published on its blog, The Pirate Bay condemned the “prosecution of those who believe in freedom of information” and stated that the tracker is being relocated to North Korea.

The administrators of the tracker commented on the situation:

“This is truly an ironic situation. We have been fighting for a free world, and our opponents are mostly huge corporations from the United States of America, a place where freedom and freedom of speech is said to be held high. At the same time, companies from that country are chasing competitors from other countries, bribing police and lawmakers, threatening political parties and physically hunting people from our crew. And to our help, comes a government famous in our part of the world for locking people up for their thoughts and forbidding access to information.”

For all external observers, the Pirate Bay servers seem to be operating from a North Korean IP address, but CNET has found a German IT expert who believes that the owners of The Pirate Bay are operating a sophisticated system that tricks observers and gives them a false location of the servers. Most likely, the statement of the world’s best known torrent tracker is a hoax meant to draw attention to the fight between The Pirate Bay and pirate parties in Europe on one side, and the big media corporations on the other side. During the last several years, key members of the Pirate Bay team have been sent to jail while the tracker itself had to be relocated several times. Now, even the Swedish Pirate Party, a staunch ally of The Pirate Bay, can no longer support the tracker because of the legal threats.

Even though the relocation to North Korea is likely just media stunt, The Pirate Bay team should seriously consider a real migration to Pyongyang. The North Korean authorities are likely to enjoy having a way to irk the West, besides advancing its nuclear program. Maybe, a North Korean Pirate Bay could become reality.
Read more: http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2013_12_19/Pirate-Bay-founder-s-mother-c alls-her-son-s-life-in-Danish-prison-a-torture-4906/