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Monday, December 15th, 2014
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| 9:05a | Top 10 Most Pirated Movies of The Week – 12/15/14
The Equalizer is the most downloaded movie. The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only. All the movies in the list are BD/DVDrips unless stated otherwise. RSS feed for the weekly movie download chart.
Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 12:27p | Fake Pirate Bay Lies to Press and Fakes User Uploads
Even today it seems strange talking about The Pirate Bay in the past tense. Many believe it’s simply a question of time before the site reappears but for others any amount of time is too long to wait. Within days, many replicas of The Pirate Bay appeared online, each trying to recreate the look and feel of the old site. While some, such as the isoHunt.to domain oldpiratebay.org, made it clear that they’re a copy of the iconic site, others are flat-out lying by pretending to be the real deal. The worst offender by far is ThePirateBay.cr. Thanks to several mainstream news outlets posting uninformed articles in the days following the raid, millions of people now believe that this site is the real deal. Admittedly, that’s not the site’s fault, but that traction is adding weight to their current campaign which involves impersonating Pirate Bay operators and lying to the media. In an email sent to out to the mainstream press, ThePirateBay.cr identify themselves as “winstonbay”, a name that has been used by genuine Pirate Bay staff in the past. By carefully weaving some fact into their press release (thanks to Emil Protalinski for the copy), their aim is to mislead. “Most of our cloud servers including load balancer are shut down except one in NZ. TPB is back and already running at thepiratebay.cr which used to be an official proxy previously,” the release reads. Referencing an earlier article on TF in which we pointed out that .CR was redirecting to another domain charging users for access, the release again blends truth and lies. “Redirection to .ee – scam site running from long time was due to technical fault while DNS propagation which was cached by server. Comments & normal user login (VIP users allowed access) are disabled currently due to excessive load.”  The fact the site brings up user registrations is interesting since their existence offers a straightforward test to determine whether a site is a clone of The Pirate Bay or not. Quite simply, clone sites do not have the millions of user accounts The Pirate Bay used to have, neither do they have associated user comments under torrents. While ThePirateBay.cr tries to explain this away by saying accounts have been disabled due to server load, they also have another trick up their sleeve. New torrents being added to the site now show names of popular uploaders. However, as pointed out by ExtraTorrent.cc, these are not being uploaded by the people in question. “None of the torrents are actually uploaded by ETTV of ExtraTorrent and we didn’t log in or sign up to that site,” ExtraTorrent told TF.  “This is them making their own bot to grab our torrents but the funny thing is that they made accounts [in our names] and are fooling members that we are uploading there. They are trying to make it look more legit so users go there.” Other user accounts recreated on the site include SaM and Juggs of ETRG, YIFY, EZTV, scene4all and BOZX, previously one of The Pirate Bay’s most popular uploaders. While people might argue that having as many Pirate Bay’s as possible is a great thing, sites like this are problematic. There have been attempts to mislead right from the very start and the recent mails to the press just make matters worse. It’s now impossible to determine the nature of their intentions but the lies aren’t a good start. Add to that the very real possibility that former TPB users (VIPs no less) might enter their usernames and passwords into this site and there’s a very real possibility of account hijacks should the original site come back online. If they use the same username and passwords elsewhere, things will go bad a lot sooner. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 4:31p | Pirate Bay Responds to The Raid, Copies and The Future
The big remaining question on everyone’s minds right now is whether the site will make a comeback, and if so, how long this will take. The TPB crew have remained awfully quiet and haven’t commented on the raid in public, but today “Mr 10100100000″ breaks the silence in order to get a message out to the world. “We were not that surprised by the raid. That is something that is a part of this game. We couldn’t care less really,” Mr 10100100000 informed TF through an encrypted channel. “We have however taken this opportunity to give ourselves a break. How long are we supposed to keep going? To what end? We were a bit curious to see how the public would react.” Without hearing about the exact issues, we get the feeling that a comeback may be more complicated than most people assume. It seems unlikely that the site will return within the next few days, but if it does eventually come back online people will surely notice. “Will we reboot? We don’t know yet. But if and when we do, it’ll be with a bang,” Mr 10100100000 says. Obviously there are discussions ongoing behind the scenes on how to proceed. The entire team including the moderators comprises a few dozen people who all have their own opinions on the matter. “The people behind TPB are like one big collective mind. There are no leaders nor any one in charge. About 30-50 people from all over the world pitch their ideas against each other and whatever comes out of that is what will be the fate of TPB.” In recent days many “copies” of The Pirate Bay appeared online and many of these have now started to add new content as well. According to the TPB crew this is a positive development, although people should be wary of scams. “Copycats are to be seen as a higher form of the proxies. If [Pirate Bay’s] code wouldn’t be so shitty we would make it public for everyone to use, so that everyone could start their own bay.” “Of course there is a problem if sites like [thepiratebay].ee try to scam people. But overall, we’d love to see a thousand Pirate Bays,” Mr 10100100000 adds. The Pirate Bay doesn’t really have a preference when it comes to the best Pirate Bay alternative and says the “swarm” has to decide which one is best. In any case, people should keep the Kopimi spirit alive as TPB is much more than some hardware stored in a dusty datacenter. “We’ve always lived by Kopimi. We love being cloned. It would be amazing if, like in the classic movie Spartacus, everyone could stand up and say “I am The Pirate Bay,” Mr 10100100000 says. To be continued. Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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