Posts by Prophet

The UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has charged a man for operating several proxy sites and services that allowed UK Internet users to bypass local pirate site blockades. In a first of its kind prosecution, the Bakersfield resident is charged with several fraud offenses and one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property.

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During the summer of 2014, City of London Police arrested the then 20-year-old Callum Haywood of Bakersfield for his involvement with several proxy sites and services.

Haywood was interrogated at a police station and later released on bail. He agreed to voluntarily hand over several domain names, but the police meanwhile continued working on the case.

One of the main services linked to the investigation was Immunicity, a censorship circumvention tool that allowed users to route their traffic through a proxy network.

In addition, Haywood was also connected to the Pirate Bay proxy list Piratereverse.info and KickassTorrents proxies Kickassunblock.info and Katunblock.com, movie2kproxy.com, h33tunblock.info and several other proxy sites.

These proxies all served as a copy of the original sites, which are blocked by several UK ISPs, allowing users to bypass restrictions imposed by the High Court. While Haywood wasn’t operating any of the original sites, police have decided to move the case ahead.

Today, after nearly two years, the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) formally announced the charges, which amount to one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property and six counts of possession of an article for use in fraud.

The charges relate to the operation of a Pirate Bay proxy and two KickassTorrent proxies.

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Based on the charges the now 22-year old student potentially risks a long prison sentence.

Possession of articles for use in fraud is punishable by up to five years in prison under UK law, while supplying articles for use in a fraud carries a sentence of up to 10 years. Converting and/or transferring criminal property is money laundering, for which the maximum sentence is 14 years.

Speaking with TorrentFreak today, Haywood denies any wrongdoing.

The prosecution is the first of its kind, in that it targets a person who allegedly assisted Internet users to bypass High Court orders to block The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites.

Even though the blocking orders don’t apply to all UK ISPs, who continue to provide access to the very same sites, PIPCU alleges that Haywood’s sites were setup to circumvent the court orders.

Haywood is scheduled to appear on bail at Nottingham Magistrates’ Court on April 21 for a preliminary hearing.

Thank you as always to Rat for these

Rat's Bouquets E2 SD FTA HD 20.3.2016

Quote from alimac

maybe if they addressed the fact here in the UK we only get about half the content as others for the same cost may well help to curb the so called pirates

Your quite right, the actual price of a sub directly from them is not too bad, but as you rightly say the content that varies between the different regions is vast

Make all the content the same everywhere and they wouldn't have these problems

Netflix has jumped on the DMCA takedown bandwagon. In recent weeks the company has reported tens of thousands of pirate links to Google alone, hoping to make pirated copies of their programming harder to find. Netflix's position on piracy deviates from a few years ago, when CEO Reed Hastings highlighted its positive sides.

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Netflix has upped its anti-piracy efforts recently, by taking a more aggressive stance against subscribers who use VPN services.

These changes were implemented to appease the major movie studios, but Netflix is also taking measures to limit access to pirated copies of its own original programming.

During the past several weeks the company has started to report thousands of ‘pirate’ links to Google, asking it to remove these from search results.

With help from their anti-piracy partner Vobile, Netflix has targeted 71,861 links to allegedly copyright infringing material from torrent and streaming sites, most of which have indeed been removed.

The links in question all point to content owned by Netflix, including popular series including House of Cards, Narcos, Sense8 and films such as The Ridiculous 6 and A Very Murray Christmas.

Unlike other copyright holders Netflix is a relative newcomer when it comes to sending DMCA takedown notices to Google. The first request was recorded last December, targeting over 3,000 links at once.

Netflix takedown request

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Netflix is targeting a wide variety of torrent, streaming and hosting sites, with uploaded.net and vodlocker.com being the prime targets.

In addition to reporting these links to Google, Netflix also appears to be reaching out to ‘pirate’ sites directly as recent listings for House of Cards and other Netflix originals are frequently removed.

While the takedown efforts are unlikely to make the piracy problem go away, Netflix likely hopes to frustrate pirates enough to convert them into paying customers. That is, if Netflix’s original programming is available in their country, which isn’t as logical as it may sound.

In any case, the takedown efforts are a notable change compared to the casual piracy attitude the company had a few years ago.

Previously, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said that the company was not really bothered too much by people who pirate content via torrent sites. In fact, Netflix admitted to using piracy data to determine what shows they should license in different regions.

“Certainly there’s some torrenting that goes on, and that’s true around the world, but some of that just creates the demand,” Hastings said at the time.

The UK's Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has arrested six individuals suspected of being involved in the supply of 'pirate' set-top boxes configured to obtain free TV from the Internet. The operation, targeting the north of England, was carried out in conjunction with the Federation Against Copyright Theft.

The advent of cheap Android devices such as Amazon’s Fire Stick and dozens of set-top variants means that anyone can install legal software such as Kodi and then modify it to do less legal things.

With the correct know how, all the latest movies, TV shows and live sports are just a few clicks away, all streamed over the Internet, for free. This ease of use irritates rightsholders who seem powerless to do much about the flood of illicit broadcasts.

Also complicating the situation is that individuals looking to make a quick buck are selling piracy-configured devices on eBay, Amazon and other venues, meaning that anyone can get in on the close-to-free TV action by shelling out a few pounds, euros or dollars.

Today, however, the UK’s Police’s Intellectual Property Unit (PIPCU) has made a tiny dent in this illicit market after arresting several individuals said to be involved in the sale of ‘pirate’ boxes configured to stream content including movies and sport.

Following the execution of seven search warrants at as many locations in the north of England (Consett, Lanchester, Washington, Gateshead, Middlesbrough, Sunderland and Seamer), six people were arrested.

Police say that a 37 year-old man targeted in Sunderland was arrested on suspicion of distributing an unauthorized decoder, money laundering and making and/or supplying items for use in fraud.

The investigation, which was carried out with the assistance of Trading Standards and the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT), led to the seizure of 42 “illegally modified” set-top boxes configured to receive subscription-only TV.

“This operation is an excellent example of multi-agency working across force boundaries to tackle piracy and those intent on making money at the expense of honest subscription payers who deserve a fair deal,” says PIPCU’s Detective Chief Inspector Peter Ratcliffe.

“We routinely seek to identify and disrupt those intent on making quick cash from piracy and will use every enforcement opportunity to bring them to justice.”

While buyers of such devices might think they’re getting value for money, both PIPCU and the Federation Against Copyright Theft are keen to point out that they’re not risk free.

“Consumers need to be aware that these cheap pre-configured TV boxes are illegal,” says FACT Director General Kieron Sharp. “They are stealing copyrighted content and starving UK businesses from revenue, as well as putting consumers’ devices at risk of malware and ransomware.”

A pirate box holding itself to ransom is an interesting concept but not one that appears to be gaining any traction on sites specializing in such topics. Indeed, in many instances using one of these boxes is much safer than visiting streaming sites directly, since much of the malicious advertising is filtered out.

This week’s arrests follow at least two previous operations (1,2) targeting the sellers of ‘pirate’ boxes in the UK.

Two men have been arrested at a cinema in the UK after being found in possession of an audio recording of the movie The Divergent Series: Allegiant. The men, aged 19 and 44, have been released on police bail pending further inquiries and are now banned from all cinemas in England and Wales.

Cinemas in many countries are today subjected to high levels of security, meaning that getting a camcorder into a venue and recording a whole movie can prove an extremely difficult task for pirates.

Over the years several ingenious ways have been found to deal with these problems and pirates are often able to record a movie and its audio at the same time. However, to get the best possible result it’s often better to record the video and the soundtrack separately.

For example, in Russia where theater security is less tight, it might be possible to record the whole movie at once. However, a Russian language soundtrack is of much less interest globally than an English one. This means that to reach the greatest audience, pirates need to find an English audio source too.

As our article last week revealed, audio can be obtained from a number of sources, not least US-based drive in cinemas. However, since audio recording devices are more easily hidden from theater staff than cameras, recordings can be made almost anywhere.

Today, however, the Federation Against Copyright Theft is reporting that at least one English language soundtrack of a major movie won’t be hitting the Internet anytime soon following the arrest of two individuals in the north of the UK.

The men, aged 19 and 44, were arrested by Northumbria Police last Thursday following a screening of “The Divergent Series: Allegiant” at the Empire Cinema in Sunderland. Following the performance it’s reported they were found in possession of an unauthorized audio recording of the movie.

According to FACT the arrests follow an investigation which involved the film’s producers, distributors, and the Motion Picture Association. Perhaps of most interest is the revelation that three previous unauthorized recordings had already been made in the same cinema. Investigators love patterns.

Although not mentioned by FACT in connection with this case, audio can be watermarked in the same way video can. This allows investigators to match audio recordings back to a specific cinema. It seems likely that watermarking played a key role in this case.

The men have been released on bail pending further inquiries. The terms of their release include an agreement not to visit any cinema in England and Wales.

Quote from hilly

dont take this the wrong way but im pleased :)

lol, i had to read that twice mate, i see what you mean, at least it's not just you :hi-five:

I tried the default Android browser, Chrome and Opera and get the same things on each

I just use my laptop now and leave the phone for phone calls lol

yes, i have been experiencing the same problems for the past few days, not sure what it is tbh

Sorry but we don't allow the discussion of rsa keys here, the thread will be locked, hope you understand

Quote from monkified

Very well made, enjoyed it

nice one mate, i thought it was really really cool as well, the special effects were great and the audio of the light sabres and drones etc...

just hope Disney don't try to sue them lol

Quote from toothfairy

Hi prophet, went and bought a netgear N600 wireless dual band gigabit router
which gives me faster wifi speed 300+300- up to 600 Mbps and is a great improvement
on the HH5. I went on the recommendation from mckee25 and glad I did so.

This sounds awesome mate and something I would certainly add to my Xmas list

Is it a modem & router combined or just the router ?

Was it difficult to setup and move your own account details over to it ?

Quote from toothfairy

Hi any people out there useing a BT home hub 5 router and
can you suggest something better. I have fibre optic option 2
and am having a lot of buffering and even signal dropout.

I had exactly the same problems as you approx a month back, i am also with BT using HH5 and option 2

I phoned them, told them i had done all the tests, tried someone else's router at it worked fine, the next day they sent me a brand new one free of charge

No problems at all since

STRIPPING 4K CONTENT PROTECTION IS FAIR USE, COURT HEARS

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LegendSky, a hardware manufacturer that creates devices enabling consumers to bypass 4K copy protection, has informed a New York federal court that they're not breaking any laws. The company is being sued by Warner Bros. and Intel daughter company Digital Content Protection, who want to shut down their sales.

Late last year several pirated copies of 4K videos started to leak from both Netflix and Amazon. These leaks were unusual as online 4k streams were always well protected against pirates.

While it’s still not clear how these videos were copied, a new lawsuit from Warner Bros. and Intel daughter company Digital Content Protection (DCP) suggests that HDFury devices may be involved.

In January the companies filed a lawsuit at a federal court in New York against the maker of the devices, technology company LegendSky, accusing it of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.

The HDFury devices in question allow users to strip the latest HDCP encryption. This hardware sits between an HDCP-compliant source and a secondary device, allowing it to pass on a “stripped” 4K signal.

This week the Chinese company responded to the allegations (pdf), asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit on the basis that DCP’s claims are ungrounded.

Among other things, the company argues that Warner Bros. and Intel will not be able to prove direct or contributory copyright infringement. Instead, they accuse DCP of copyright abuse to keep its monopoly intact.

“Plaintiffs’ claims are barred […] because of copyright abuse. Plaintiffs’ action against Defendant is an intentionally unlawful attempt to extend the scope of Plaintiffs’ copyright monopolies beyond their legal scope,” LegendSky writes.

The hardware manufacturer states that its products do not violate the DMCA. Instead, they point out that this type of circumvention is specifically permitted as a fair use exception, in order to connect two separate computer programs.

“Plaintiffs’ claims are barred by the doctrine of fair use,” the rebuttal reads.

“In particular, to the extent that Defendants’ products circumvent within the meaning of the DMCA, such circumvention is lawful because it enables interoperability between independently created computer programs with other programs.”

LegendSky further argues that DCP doesn’t have jurisdiction over the Chinese company and in its reply requests that the New York District Court dismisses the complaint.

It’s expected that the content protection outfit will counter LegendSky’s arguments during the weeks to come, as it’s essential for Warner Bros. that 4K copy protection remains strong.

The movie studio previously announced that it will release several dozen 4K Blu-ray movies this year and would rather not see these end up on pirate sites in the best quality possible.

One of the ones from Dreambox / VU should work if running on E2

Need a lot of storage? Like, a lot a lot? Samsung has you covered.

The Korean tech giant on Thursday announced it has started shipping what it calls the "industry's largest solid state drive"—the 15.36TB "PM1633a" we first heard about in August. To put the size of this thing in perspective, the largest hard drives made by Seagate and Western Digital top out at 8 to 10TB.

Samsung's PM1633a is based on a 12Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, designed for use in enterprise storage systems. In a statement, Samsung's Senior Vice President of memory product planning and application engineering, Jung-bae Lee, said Samsung created the drive "to satisfy an increasing market need for ultra-high-capacity SAS SSDs."

"We are directing our best efforts toward meeting our customers' SSD requests," Lee said. "We will continue to lead the industry with next-generation SSDs, using our advanced 3D V-NAND memory technology, in order to accelerate the growth of the premium memory market while delivering greater performance and efficiency to our customers."

Samsung still has not yet revealed how much the massive drive will set you back, but don't expect it to come cheap. The company did mention that it will also release 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 480GB versions later this year, so they should be a tad more budget-friendly.

"The secret sauce behind Samsung's 16TB SSD is the company's new 256Gbit (32GB) NAND flash die; twice the capacity of 128Gbit NAND dies that were commercialized by various chip makers last year," Ars Technica UK explained in August. "To reach such an astonishing density, Samsung has managed to cram 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND into a single die. This is up from 24 layers in 2013, and then 36 layers in 2014."

And the PM1633a? It uses between 480 and 500 of the new NAND flash chips.

Samsung said the drive allows for "significant improvements in the efficiency of IT system investments," offering "random read and write speeds of up to 200,000 and 32,000 IOPS respectively, and … sequential read and write speeds of up to 1,200MB/s."

Source : http://uk.pcmag.com/storage-de…worlds-largest-hard-drive

A Pennsylvania man is facing up to five years in prison for recording the audio of several Hollywood movies at a local drive-in theater. The man allegedly worked for a release group and was caught after the MPAA tipped off the theater owner. He now faces up to five years in prison.

One of the upsides of drive-in cinemas is that people are free to chat inside their cars and enjoy a movie privately.

Pirates have a big plus as well, as drive-ins make it much easier to record high quality audio. For this reason, camcorded films are often a combination of indoor video and drive-in audio.

Generally speaking it is very hard to spot someone recording an audio stream in his or her car, but a drive-in near Pittsburgh managed to track one down with help from Hollywood.

The man, Brian Ridley, allegedly recorded audio of the movies “Sex Tape,” “Planes: Fire and Rescue,” and “The Purge” during the summer of 2014.

The 38-year-old man was caught after a tip from the MPAA who asked the theater owner to look out for his license plate, and call the local police if he did.

Following a careful investigation Ridley has recently been indicted (pdf), with the Government describing him as part of a larger conspiracy to release pirated movies on the Internet.

From the indictment

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According to the indictment “the audio and video files would be sent over the Internet to a conspirator who would sync the audio and video files together,” after which, “the completed audio/video copies would be placed on the Internet for others to download.”

The other members of the conspiracy are not known, but it is likely that they are part of an established release group.

While Ridley supposedly recorded audio for multiple movies, he is only charged with unauthorized copying of the Cameron Diaz movie “Sex Tape.”

“Sex Tape” was not yet released at the time the audio was allegedly recorded. However, a pirated copy eventually appeared online at the end of July, after Ridley was caught.

During the arrest the authorities seized three SanDisk “Sansa” MP3 Recorders. These devices are typically connected to the drive-in’s audio feed, and presumably contained portions of the pirated audio.

According to court records Ridley has been released on bail and will be arraigned later this month. If found guilty, he faces a maximum prison sentence of three years for copyright infringement and five years for the conspiracy charge.

If things weren't so tight I would be very tempted to have this for my son's room

Whoever does get this is getting a bargain, quality receiver

UK Internet providers have added more than 80 URLs to the national pirate site blocklist. The expansion follows a request from copyright holders who frequently add new proxies for sites that have previously been barred. One of the main targets of the latest round is Unblocked.li, which has already responded by switching to a new home.

After a series of High Court orders obtained since 2012, six of the UK’s major ISPs are required to block access to dozens of the world’s most popular ‘pirate’ sites.

Over the past several years the number of blocked domains has expanded to well over 1,000, with popular torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and KickassTorrents being the main targets.

The blocks are somewhat effective, at least in preventing subscribers from accessing the domains directly. However, there are plenty of alternative routes people can use instead, including many reverse proxies.

To remedy the situation the High Court permits copyright holders to expand the blocklists with new domains, provided that they are alternative ways to reach already blocked websites.

This week more than 80 pirate (sub)domains were added, including several proxies for popular torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, ExtraTorrent and BitSnoop.

More than a dozen of these new additions are subdomains of the proxy portal unblocked.li, which allows UK visitors to bypass the blocking restrictions and visit their favorite pirate sites.

In recent months unblocked.li has gained a steady user-base and it is currently among the 150 most-visited domain names in the UK.

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Considering the nature of the site, the proxy portal is not going to surrender easily. Indeed, TorrentFreak has learned that the new blockade is seen as only a minor and temporary inconvenience.

“We have several domains ready in case unblocked.li is blocked,” the operator of Unblocked.li says.

“We will launch a new domain once we receive enough complaints of the site not loading or showing blocked. It’s a pretty simple task now since we have automated the migration to new domains with scripts and APIs,” he adds.

At the time of writing the Unblocked site has already switched over to the new unblocked.red domain, and others will likely follow, repeating the same steps in a few months.

And so the whack-a-mole continues, with copyright holders adding new domains to the blocklists, and site owners hopping from domain to domain.

—-

Below is the full list of newly blocked (sub)domains as reported by one of ISPs.

http://1337x.unblocked.li
http://1337x.unblocked2.bz
http://1337x.unblockme.co
http://ahoy.re
http://beemp3.unblocked.li
http://bitsnoop.unblocked.li
http://bittorrent.so
http://emp3world.unblocked.li
http://extratorrent.date
http://extratorrent.unblocked.li
http://extratorrent.unblockme.co
http://fullsongs.science
http://kat.asia
http://kattorrents.co
http://kickass.ac
http://kickass.ag
http://kickass.lv
http://kickass.unblocked.li
http://kickasstorrent.proxy-index.com
http://kickasstorrentsso.com
http://limetorrents.space
http://limtorrents.com
http://mp3bear.tv
http://mp3boo.cc
http://mp3clan.be
http://mp3clan.in
http://mp3clan.media
http://mp3clan.rocks
http://mp3clan.ws
http://mp3skull.ren
http://mp3skull.unblocked.li
http://mp3skull.us
http://mp3skull.yoga
http://newalbumreleases.unblocked.li
http://piratebay.co.in
http://pirateproxy.pw
http://proxy-index.com
http://seedpeer.unblocked.li
http://stafaband.bid
http://stafaband.online
http://stafaband.uk
http://thepairatebay.link
http://thepiratebay.ae
http://thepiratebay.al
http://thepiratebay.bid
http://thepiratebay.rs
http://thepiratebay.tech
http://torlock.unblocked.li
http://torrentbit.unblocked.li
http://torrentdownloads.to
http://torrenthound.site
http://torrenthound.unblocked.li
http://torrentreactor.unblocked.li
http://tpb.immunicity.info
http://ukpirate.org
http://vitorrentz.tv
http://www.bittorrent.so
http://www.extratorrent.date
http://www.fullsongs.science
http://www.kat.asia
http://www.kickass.ac
http://www.kickass.ag
http://www.kickass.lv
http://www.limetorrents.space
http://www.mp3bear.tv
http://www.mp3boo.cc
http://www.mp3skull.ren
http://www.mp3skull.us
http://www.mp3skull.yoga
http://www.stafaband.bid
http://www.stafaband.online
http://www.stafaband.uk
http://www.thepiratebay.ae
http://www.thepiratebay.al
http://www.thepiratebay.bid
http://www.thepiratebay.rs
http://www.thepiratebay.tech
http://www.torrentdownloads.to
http://www.torrenthound.site
http://www.torrentz.futbol
http://www.vitorrentz.tv
http://yatorrents.com